Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Letters, Chuo University, 742-1 Higashi-nakano, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan.
PLoS One. 2013 Dec 4;8(12):e82073. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0082073. eCollection 2013.
Many social animals can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar faces. Orangutans, however, lead a semi-solitary life and spend much of the day alone. As such, they may be less adept at recognizing conspecifics and are a good model for determining how social structure influences the evolution of social cognition such as facial recognition. The present study is the first report of whether orangutans can distinguish among individual faces. We adopted a preferential looking method and found that orangutans used facial discrimination to identify known conspecifics. This suggests that frequent and intense social interaction is not necessary for facial discrimination, although our findings were limited by the small number of stimuli and the unequal numbers of male and female orangutans depicted in the stimuli.
许多社会性动物能够区分熟悉和陌生的面孔。然而，猩猩过着半独居的生活，大部分时间都是独自度过的。因此，它们可能不太擅长识别同种个体，是研究社会结构如何影响社会认知（如人脸识别）进化的良好模型。本研究首次报告了猩猩是否能够区分个体的面孔。我们采用了偏好性注视法，发现猩猩可以通过面部识别来辨别已知的同种个体。这表明，频繁和强烈的社会互动并非面部识别所必需的，尽管我们的研究结果受到刺激物数量较少以及刺激物中雄性和雌性猩猩数量不均的限制。
