Gao Jie, Kawakami Fumito, Tomonaga Masaki
Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan.
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2020 Apr 28;10(1):7148. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-63876-x.
Both humans and chimpanzees have better performances when recognizing faces or bodies when the stimuli are upright compared to inverted. This is called the inversion effect. It suggests that these two species use a specific way to process faces and bodies. Previous research has suggested that humans also show the inversion effect to objects that they have expertise about, and this is called the expert effect. We investigated whether chimpanzees show the expert effect and how humans and chimpanzees differ by testing chimpanzees (human experts) with human body stimuli and testing humans (chimpanzee experts) with chimpanzee and human body stimuli in body recognition tasks. The main finding was that humans (chimpanzee experts) showed the expert effect to chimpanzee bodies, while chimpanzees partially showed it to human bodies. This suggests that compared with chimpanzees, the special processing in humans can be more flexibly tuned for other objects. We also tested humans that were not chimpanzee experts using chimpanzee body stimuli. Although they showed similar performances as the chimpanzee experts, the two groups had differences in some situations, indicating the effect of expertise. This study revealed the important role of experience in object processing in humans, and our evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees.
与倒置的刺激相比，人类和黑猩猩在识别直立的面孔或身体时表现更好。这被称为倒置效应。这表明这两个物种使用一种特定的方式来处理面孔和身体。先前的研究表明，人类对他们所擅长的物体也表现出倒置效应，这被称为专家效应。我们通过在身体识别任务中用人体刺激测试黑猩猩（人类专家），并用黑猩猩和人体刺激测试人类（黑猩猩专家），来研究黑猩猩是否表现出专家效应以及人类和黑猩猩有何不同。主要发现是，人类（黑猩猩专家）对黑猩猩身体表现出专家效应，而黑猩猩对人体部分地表现出专家效应。这表明与黑猩猩相比，人类的特殊加工能够更灵活地针对其他物体进行调整。我们还用黑猩猩身体刺激测试了非黑猩猩专家的人类。尽管他们与黑猩猩专家表现出相似的性能，但两组在某些情况下存在差异，表明了专业知识的影响。这项研究揭示了经验在人类以及我们的进化近亲黑猩猩的物体加工中的重要作用。
