Parr Lisa A, Heintz Matthew, Lonsdorf Elizabeth, Wroblewski Emily
Division of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences andYerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, 954 Gatewood Rd., Atlanta, GA 30329, USA.
J Comp Psychol. 2010 Nov;124(4):343-50. doi: 10.1037/a0020545.
Faces provide important information about identity, age, and even kinship. A previous study in chimpanzees reported greater similarity between the faces of mothers and sons compared with mothers and daughters, or unrelated individuals. This was interpreted as an inbreeding avoidance mechanism where females, the dispersing gender, should avoid mating with any male that resembles their mother. Alternatively, male faces may be more distinctive than female faces, biasing attention toward males. To test these hypotheses, chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys matched conspecifics' faces of unfamiliar mothers and fathers with their sons and daughters. Results showed no evidence of male distinctiveness, rather a cross-gender effect was found: chimpanzees were better matching moms with sons and fathers with daughters. Rhesus monkeys, however, showed an overwhelming bias toward male-distinctiveness. They were faster to learn male faces, performed better on father-offspring and parent-son trials, and were best matching fathers with sons. This suggests that for the rhesus monkey, inbreeding avoidance involves something other than facial phenotypic matching but that among chimpanzees, the visual recognition of facial similarities may play an important role.
面部提供了有关身份、年龄甚至亲属关系的重要信息。先前一项针对黑猩猩的研究报告称，与母亲和女儿或无血缘关系的个体相比，母亲和儿子的面部之间相似度更高。这被解释为一种近亲繁殖规避机制，即作为扩散性别的雌性应避免与任何与自己母亲相像的雄性交配。或者，雄性面孔可能比雌性面孔更具独特性，从而使注意力偏向雄性。为了验证这些假设，黑猩猩和恒河猴将陌生母亲和父亲的同种个体面孔与他们的儿子和女儿进行匹配。结果没有显示出雄性独特性的证据，反而发现了一种跨性别效应：黑猩猩在将母亲与儿子、父亲与女儿进行匹配时表现更佳。然而，恒河猴表现出对雄性独特性的压倒性偏向。它们学习雄性面孔更快，在父子和母子配对试验中表现更好，并且在将父亲与儿子进行匹配时最为擅长。这表明，对于恒河猴来说，近亲繁殖规避涉及的不仅仅是面部表型匹配，但在黑猩猩中，对面部相似性的视觉识别可能起着重要作用。
