Rhesus monkeys found to see faces in inanimate objects too

August 28, 2017 by Bob Yirka report

A team of researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has found that rhesus monkeys, like humans, recognize face-like traits in inanimate objects. In their study published in the journal Current Biology, the researchers describe experiments they carried out with monkeys looking at photographs and what they learned from them.

Humans are notorious for seeing face-like characteristics in inanimate objects—the likeness of an old woman in a sliced tomato, Jesus in a potato chip, etc. Such recognition is known as pareidolia, and has been studied extensively in humans. But does it also happen with animals? That is what the researchers with this new effort sought to learn. They chose a relatively obvious animal for a subject, rhesus monkeys. Not only are they more human-like than most other animals, but they are also very social, which prior work with humans has suggested is very strongly tied to pareidolia.

The team worked with five of the monkeys, showing them pairs of pictures on a computer screen while timing how long they looked at them. Prior research has shown that rhesus monkeys, like humans, tend to stare longer at faces than at other objects. The monkeys were shown pictures of objects that a group of humans had already approved as having face-like characteristics. They were also shown pictures of similar objects without face-like characteristics. And for comparison, they were also shown pictures of the faces of other rhesus monkeys.

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Chimps Can Spot Faces Like Humans Do

by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | July 16, 2015 11:54am ET

Chimpanzees can quickly identify the faces of other chimps, as well as those of human adults and babies. These new findings could shed light on human and chimp evolution, scientists  say.

Faces are key to human social lives, conveying key data about how one feels. As such, humans are wired to pay special attention to faces. For example, when pictures of faces are mixed in with pictures of other items such as cars and houses, people can detect the faces effortlessly.

Prior research has also shown that humans see faces differently from how they see other objects; for instance, facial recognition is severely hampered when people are shown upside-down faces, or when an image of a face is modified so that the nose and mouth are located beneath the eyes. These past findings suggest that the human brain analyzes faces in a holistic manner — that is, it understands images of faces by looking at the whole.

Increasingly, scientists find that chimps, humanity's closest living relatives, also see faces differently than they do other items. To learn more about the chimp response to faces, scientists first trained three adult chimpanzees named Chloe, Pendesa and Ai to find pictures of a chimp face, a banana, a car and a house among groups of other images on a touch screen. 

The researchers found that the apes recognized the chimp face very efficiently. "Chimpanzees very quickly find a face in the pile of various objects," said study lead author Masaki Tomonaga, a primatologist and comparative cognitive scientist at Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute in Japan.

However, the chimps' ability to detect a chimp face was significantly hampered when the face was upside down. This suggests that chimps may analyze faces holistically, like humans do.

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Monkey Mustaches and Beards Help Algorithm Recognize Faces

by Laura Geggel, Staff Writer | February 03, 2015 07:02pm ET

Colorful monkeys called guenons sport moustaches, nose spots and ear tufts that make it easy to distinguish between different species of guenons. But to the average passers-by, monkeys of the same species might look strikingly similar.

But in a new study, researchers uploaded 541 photographs of 110 monkeys of 12 different guenon species. The scientists found that a computer algorithm could correctly identify these monkeys by their faces, as well as distinguish among species.

Scientists might be able to use algorithms like this one to study which factors are important in evolution, the researchers said. For instance, the algorithms could look at which aspects of a monkey's face are important to its evolutionary success.

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