Institute of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University , Leiden, The Netherlands.
Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition , Leiden, The Netherlands.
Proc Biol Sci. 2024 Aug;291(2028):20240433. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2024.0433. Epub 2024 Aug 7.
Perceiving emotions in others is at the foundation of higher-order social cognition. The importance of emotions is evidenced by the fact that they receive prioritized attention at early stages of processing the environment in humans and some other primates. Nevertheless, we do not fully understand how emotion modulates attention over longer durations in primates, particularly in great apes. Bonobos, one of our closest relatives, stand out in emotion processing and regulation among great apes. This makes them an interesting comparison species and a valuable model for studying the evolution of emotion perception in hominids. We investigated how bonobos and humans spontaneously attend to emotionally valent scenes in a preferential looking task using eye-tracking. With Bayesian mixed modelling, we found that bonobos and humans generally looked longer at emotional scenes, mainly of conspecifics. Moreover, while bonobos did not have a bias toward emotional human scenes, humans sustained their attention toward bonobos playing, grooming and having sex. Furthermore, when exploring an immediate bias for emotions, humans showed a bias toward affiliative human scenes, and bonobos showed a bias away from bonobos-in-distress scenes. These findings suggest that emotions modulate attention at early and later attentional stages in bonobos, similar to humans.
感知他人的情绪是高级社会认知的基础。情绪的重要性体现在，在人类和其他一些灵长类动物对环境进行早期处理的过程中，它们会优先得到关注。然而，我们并不完全理解情绪如何在灵长类动物中长时间调节注意力，特别是在大型猿类中。作为我们最亲近的亲属之一，倭黑猩猩在情绪处理和调节方面表现突出。这使它们成为一个有趣的比较物种，也是研究人类情绪感知进化的宝贵模型。我们通过眼动追踪，在偏好性注视任务中，研究了倭黑猩猩和人类如何自发地注意到有情绪价值的场景。通过贝叶斯混合建模，我们发现倭黑猩猩和人类通常会更长时间地注视情绪场景，主要是同类的场景。此外，虽然倭黑猩猩对人类情绪场景没有偏好，但人类会持续关注正在玩耍、梳理毛发和发生性行为的倭黑猩猩。此外，当探索即时的情绪偏好时，人类对有亲和力的人类场景表现出偏好，而倭黑猩猩对处于困境中的倭黑猩猩场景则表现出回避。这些发现表明，情绪在倭黑猩猩和人类中，在早期和后期的注意力阶段都能调节注意力。
