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Tobii EyeTracking's List: Animal behaviour

  • Aug 05, 10

    ABSTRACT
    Previous studies have shown that a variety of animals including humans are sensitive to social cues from others and shift their attention to the same objects attended to by others. However, little is known about how animals process conspecifics' and another species' actions, although primates recognize conspecific faces better than those of another species. In this study, using unrestrained eye-tracking techniques, we first demonstrated that conspecific social cues modulated looking behaviours of chimpanzees more than human cues, whereas human observers were equally sensitive to both species. Additionally, first pass gaze duration at the face indicates that chimpanzees looked at the chimpanzees' face longer than the human face, suggesting that chimpanzees might extract more referential information from a conspecific face. These results also imply that a unique ability for extracting referential information from a variety of social objects has emerged during human evolution.

  • Apr 07, 10

    Abstract:
    How do chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, the species with the closest evolutionary connection to humans, view faces? This study is the first to use the eye-tracking method to perform direct comparisons between humans and chimpanzees with regard to face scanning. Members of both species viewed the same sets of photographs representing conspecific and nonconspecific faces under the same experimental conditions. Chimpanzees and humans showed systematic and similar patterns of face scanning, including intensely viewing main facial features (i.e. eyes, nose and mouth) and inspecting the eyes and mouth, in that order. However, several differences between the species were also evident. For example, humans were more likely to show sequential refixations on the eye regions than were chimpanzees, whereas chimpanzees were more likely to engage in quick, vertical scanning over the eyes and mouth. Such species similarities and differences were consistent across conspecific and nonconspecific faces and were thus independent of the external morphologies of species-specific faces. Furthermore, when presented with facial expressions, chimpanzees changed their scanning patterns in response to those facial actions, whereas humans maintained intense eye viewing across the expressions. Finally, we discuss how these face-scanning patterns are related to species-specific forms of facial communication in chimpanzees and humans, and suggest that both species have unique eye movement strategies for interactions with conspecifics.

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