Department of Neurobiology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Anim Cogn. 2012 May;15(3):401-7. doi: 10.1007/s10071-011-0467-5. Epub 2011 Dec 13.
Most primates are both highly visual and highly social. These qualities predict that visual cues to social variables, such as identity, sex, social status, and reproductive quality, would be intrinsically valuable and systematically attract attention. Supporting this idea, thirsty male rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) will forego fluid reward to view images of the faces of high-ranking males and the sexual skin of females. Whether female rhesus macaques, who experience dramatically different social pressures and reproductive costs than male macaques, also systematically and spontaneously value visual cues to social information remains untested experimentally. We probed the preferences of female rhesus macaques, given the opportunity to display an image from a known class of social stimuli or touch a second target to display a blank screen. We found that females preferred faces of high-status males and also images of the perinea of both males and females, but were not motivated to display images of subordinate males or control stimuli. These findings endorse the view that both male and female rhesus macaques-and presumably other highly social primates-seek information about other individuals in a way that matches the adaptive value of that information for guiding social behavior.
大多数灵长类动物既具有高度的视觉能力，又具有高度的社交能力。这些特点表明，与身份、性别、社会地位和生殖质量等社会变量有关的视觉线索具有内在价值，并会系统地吸引注意力。支持这一观点的是，口渴的雄性恒河猴（Macaca mulatta）会放弃液体奖励，而去观看高等级雄性和雌性性皮肤的面部图像。然而，雌性恒河猴所经历的社会压力和生殖成本与雄性大不相同，它们是否也会系统地、自发地重视社会信息的视觉线索，这在实验中尚未得到检验。我们探查了雌性恒河猴的偏好，如果有机会展示已知类别的社会刺激的图像，或者触摸第二个目标来显示空白屏幕，它们会怎么做。我们发现，雌性更喜欢高地位雄性的面孔，也更喜欢雄性和雌性的会阴部图像，但对展示低地位雄性或对照刺激的图像没有兴趣。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即雄性和雌性恒河猴——以及其他可能的高度社会性灵长类动物——会以一种与社会行为指导信息的适应价值相匹配的方式，寻求有关其他个体的信息。
