Abstract
Humans quickly recognize threats such as snakes and threatening faces, suggesting that human ancestors evolved specialized visual systems to detect biologically relevant threat stimuli. Although non-human primates also detect snakes quickly, it is unclear whether primates share the efficient visual systems to process the threatening faces of their conspecifics. Primates may not necessarily process conspecific threats by facial expressions, because threats from conspecifics in natural situations are often accompanied by other cues such as threatening actions (or attacks) and vocal calls. Here, we show a similar threat superiority effect in both humans and macaque Japanese monkeys. In visual search tasks, monkeys and humans both responded to pictures of a threatening face of an unfamiliar adult male monkey among neutral faces faster than to pictures of a neutral face among threatening faces. However, the monkeys’ response times to detect deviant pictures of a non-face stimulus were not slower when it was shown among threat faces than when it was shown among neutral faces. These results provide the first evidence that monkeys have an attentional bias toward the threatening faces of conspecifics and suggest that threatening faces are evolutionarily relevant fear stimuli. The subcortical visual systems in primates likely process not only snakes, but also more general biological threat-relevant stimuli, including threatening conspecific faces.
References
Fox E, Damjanovic L (2006) The eyes are sufficient to produce a threat superiority effect. Emotion 6:534–539. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.6.3.534
Fox E, Lester V, Russo R, Bowles RJ, Pichler A, Dutton K (2000) Facial expressions of emotion: are angry faces detected more efficiently? Cogn Emot 14:61–92
Hansen CH, Hansen RD (1988) Finding the face in the crowd: an anger superiority effect. J Personal Soc Psychol 54:917–924
Hayakawa S, Kawai N, Masataka N (2011) The influence of color on snake detection in visual search in human children. Sci Rep 1:1–4
Isbell LA (2009) The fruit, the tree, and the serpent. Why we see so well. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Johnson MH (1992) Imprinting and the development of face recognition: from chick to man. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 1:52–55
Jones RB (1980) Reactions of male domestic chicks to two-dimensional eye-like shapes. Anim Behav 28:212–218
Kanazawa S (1996) Recognition of facial expressions in a Japanese monkey. Primates 37:25–38
Koba R, Izumi A (2006) Sex categorization of conspecific pictures in Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata). Anim Cogn 9(3):183–191. doi:10.1007/s10071-006-0020-0
LeDoux JE (1996) The emotional brain. Simon and Schuster, New York
Mandalaywala TM, Parker KJ, Maestripieri D (2014) Early experience affects the strength of vigilance for threat in rhesus monkey infants. Psychol Sci 25(10):1893–1902. doi:10.1177/0956797614544175
Masataka N, Hayakawa S, Kawai N (2010) Human young children as well as adults demonstrate ‘superior’ rapid snake detection when typical striking posture is displayed by the snake. PLoS One 5:e15122
Micheletta J, Whitehouse J, Parr LA, Marshman P, Engelhardt A, Waller BM (2015) Familiar and unfamiliar face recognition in crested macaques (Macaca nigra). R Soc Open Sci 2:150109. doi:10.1098/rsos.150109
Nahm FKD, Perret A, Amaral DG, Albright TD (1997) How do monkeys look at faces? J Cogn Neurosci 9:611–623. doi:10.1162/jocn.1997.9.5.611
Öhman A, Mineka S (2001) Fears, phobias, and preparedness: toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychol Rev 108:483–522
Öhman A, Flykt A, Esteves F (2001a) Emotion drives attention: detecting the snake in the grass. J Exp Psychol Gen 130:466–478
Öhman A, Lundqvist D, Esteves F (2001b) The face in the crowd revisited: a threat advantage with schematic stimuli. J Pers Soc Psychol 80:381–396
Öhman A, Soares SC, Juth P, Lindstrom B, Esteves F (2012) Evolutionary derived modulations of attention to two common fear stimuli: serpents and hostile humans. J Cogn Psychol 24:17–32
Parr LA, Heintz M (2009) Facial expression recognition in rhesus monkeys, Macaca mulatta. Anim Behav 77:1507–1513. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.02.024
Parr LA, Winslow JT, Hopkins WD, de Waal FBM (2000) Recognizing facial cues: individual discrimination by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). J Comp Psychol 114:47–60. doi:10.1037/0735-7036.114.1.47
Pokorny JJ, de Waal FBM (2009) Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106(51):21539–21543. doi:10.1073/pnas.0912174106
Rosa Salva O, Vallortigara G (2015) Roots of a social brain: developmental models of emerging animacy-detection mechanisms. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 50:150–168
Rosa Salva O, Farroni T, Regolin L, Vallortigara G, Johnson MH (2011) The evolution of social orienting: evidence from chicks (Gallus gallus) and human newborns. PLoS One 6(4):e18802. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018802
Rosa Salva O, Regolin L, Vallortigara G (2012) Inversion of contrast polarity abolishes spontaneous preferences for face-like stimuli in newborn chickes. Behav Brain Res 228:113–143
Sackett GP (1966) Monkeys reared in isolation with pictures as visual input: evidence for an innate releasing mechanism. Science 154(755):1468–1473
Scaife M (1976) The response to eye-like shapes by birds. I. The effect of context: a predator and a strange bird. Anim Behav 24:195–196
Shibasaki M, Kawai N (2009) Rapid detection of snakes by Japanese Monkeys (Macaca fuscata): an evolutionarily predisposed visual system. J Comp Psychol 123:131–135
Steckenfinger SA, Ghazanfar AA (2009) Monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:18362–18366
Striano T, Kopp F, Grossmann T, Reid VM (2006) Eye contact influences neural processing of emotional expressions in 4-month-old infants. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 1(2):87–94
Tipples J, Atkinson AP, Young AW (2002) The eyebrow frown: a salient social signal. Emotion 2:288–296
Tomonaga M, Imura T (2010) Visual search for human gaze direction by a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). PLoS One 5(2):e9131. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009131
Vick SJ, Waller BM, Parr LA, Smith Pasqualini MC, Bard KA (2007) A cross-species comparison of facial morphology and movement in humans and chimpanzees using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). J Nonverbal Behav 31(1):1–20
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 25285199 and 30335062 to NK. We thank Xiaoben Sun for her help conducting experiments, Tae Terazawa for producing stimuli, and Akemi Kato for taking images.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kawai, N., Kubo, K., Masataka, N. et al. Conserved evolutionary history for quick detection of threatening faces. Anim Cogn 19, 655–660 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0949-y
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0949-y