Macacos reconhecem as faces de colegas do grupo em fotografias

Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs

Jennifer J. Pokorny1 and Frans B. M. de Waal1
- Author Affiliations

Living Links, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322
Contributed by Frans B. M. de Waal, October 22, 2009 (sent for review July 30, 2009)

Abstract

Nonhuman primates posses a highly developed capacity for face recognition, which resembles the human capacity both cognitively and neurologically. Face recognition is typically tested by having subjects compare facial images, whereas there has been virtually no attention to how they connect these images to reality. Can nonhuman primates recognize familiar individuals in photographs? Such facial identification was examined in brown or tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), a New World primate, by letting subjects categorize facial images of conspecifics as either belonging to the in-group or out-group. After training on an oddity task with four images on a touch screen, subjects correctly identified one in-group member as odd among three out-group members, and vice versa. They generalized this knowledge to both new images of the same individuals and images of juveniles never presented before, thus suggesting facial identification based on real-life experience with the depicted individuals. This ability was unexplained by potential color cues because the same results were obtained with grayscale images. These tests demonstrate that capuchin monkeys, like humans, recognize whom they see in a picture.

face recognition individual discrimination oddity primate visual discrimination

Footnotes

1To whom correspondence may be addressed: E-mail: jpokorn@emory.edu or dewaal@emory.edu

Author contributions: J.J.P. and F.B.M.d.W. designed research; J.J.P. performed research; J.J.P. and F.B.M.d.W. analyzed data; and J.J.P. and F.B.M.d.W. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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