Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary University of London, E1 4NS London, United Kingdom;
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, 38068 Rovereto, Italy.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Sep 29;117(39):24047-24049. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2011453117. Epub 2020 Sep 14.
At the beginning of life, inexperienced babies and human fetuses, domestic chicks, and monkeys exhibit a preference for faces and face-like configurations (three blobs arranged like an upside-down triangle). Because all of these species have parental care, it is not clear whether the early preference for faces is a mechanism for orienting toward the conspecifics and sustaining parental care, or a more general mechanism to attend to living beings. We contrasted these hypotheses by testing inexperienced hatchlings of five species of tortoises, solitary animals with no parental care. If early face-like preference evolved in the context of parental care, solitary species should not exhibit it. We observed that visually naïve tortoises prefer to approach face-like patterns over alternative configurations. The predisposition to approach face-like stimuli observed in hatchlings of these solitary species suggests the presence of an ancient mechanism, ancestral to the evolution of reptiles and mammals, that sustains the exploratory responses, and potentially learning, in both solitary and social species.
在生命的早期，缺乏经验的婴儿和人类胎儿、家鸡和猴子都表现出对人脸和类人脸形状的偏好（三个blob 排列成倒三角形）。由于所有这些物种都有亲代照顾，因此尚不清楚早期对人脸的偏好是一种朝向同种生物并维持亲代照顾的机制，还是一种更普遍的关注生物的机制。我们通过测试五种龟类（无亲代照顾的独居动物）的未经验证的幼龟来对比这些假设。如果早期的类人脸偏好是在亲代照顾的背景下进化的，那么独居物种就不应该表现出这种偏好。我们观察到，视觉上不成熟的龟类更喜欢接近类人脸的图案而不是其他形状。在这些独居物种的幼龟中观察到的接近类人脸刺激的倾向表明，存在一种古老的机制，这种机制是爬行动物和哺乳动物进化的基础，它维持着探索反应，并且可能在独居和群居物种中都具有学习能力。
