[BERG] Getting to the Bottom of Face Processing. Species-Specific Inversion Effects for Faces & Behinds in Humans & Chimpanzees

Hey BERGers This may be of interest http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165357 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/12/05/chimpanzees-see-butts-… & http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/12/05/chimpanzees-see-butts-…. [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?id=10.1371/journal.po… Getting to the Bottom of Face Processing. Species-Specific Inversion Effects for Faces and Behinds in Humans and Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes)<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal… journals.plos.org For social species such as primates, the recognition of conspecifics is crucial for their survival. As demonstrated by the 'face inversion effect', humans are experts in recognizing faces and unlike objects, recognize their identity by processing it configurally. The human face, with its distinct features such as eye-whites, eyebrows, red lips and cheeks signals emotions, intentions, health and sexual attraction and, as we will show here, shares important features with the primate behind. Chimpanzee females show a swelling and reddening of the anogenital region around the time of ovulation. This provides an important socio-sexual signal for group members, who can identify individuals by their behinds. We hypothesized that chimpanzees process behinds configurally in a way humans process faces. In four different delayed matching-to-sample tasks with upright and inverted body parts, we show that humans demonstrate a face, but not a behind inversion effect and that chimpanzees show a behind, but no clear face BW. ________________________________ The University is ranked in the QS World Rankings of the top 5% of universities in the world (QS World University Rankings, 2014) The University of Stirling is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC 011159.