Dufour Valerie, Pascalis Olivier, Petit Odile
Cepe, UPR 9010, CNRS, 7 rue de l'Universite, 67000 Strasbourg, France.
Behav Processes. 2006 Jul;73(1):107-13. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2006.04.006. Epub 2006 Apr 22.
Most primates live in social groups which survival and stability depend on individuals' abilities to create strong social relationships with other group members. The existence of those groups requires to identify individuals and to assign to each of them a social status. Individual recognition can be achieved through vocalizations but also through faces. In humans, an efficient system for the processing of own species faces exists. This specialization is achieved through experience with faces of conspecifics during development and leads to the loss of ability to process faces from other primate species. We hypothesize that a similar mechanism exists in social primates. We investigated face processing in one Old World species (genus Macaca) and in one New World species (genus Cebus). Our results show the same advantage for own species face recognition for all tested subjects. This work suggests in all species tested the existence of a common trait inherited from the primate ancestor: an efficient system to identify individual faces of own species only.
大多数灵长类动物生活在社会群体中，其生存和稳定取决于个体与其他群体成员建立牢固社会关系的能力。这些群体的存在需要识别个体并为每个个体赋予社会地位。个体识别可以通过发声实现，也可以通过面部识别。在人类中，存在一种有效的处理本物种面部的系统。这种专业化是通过在发育过程中与同种个体的面部接触经验实现的，并导致处理其他灵长类物种面部的能力丧失。我们假设在社会性灵长类动物中存在类似的机制。我们研究了一种旧世界物种（猕猴属）和一种新世界物种（卷尾猴属）的面部处理。我们的结果表明，所有受试对象在识别本物种面部方面都具有相同的优势。这项研究表明，在所有受试物种中都存在从灵长类祖先遗传下来的共同特征：一个仅能有效识别本物种个体面部的系统。
