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Spot the odd one out: do snake pictures capture macaques’ attention more than other predators?

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Abstract

Detecting and identifying predators quickly is key to survival. According to the Snake Detection Theory (SDT), snakes have been a substantive threat to primates for millions of years, so that dedicated visual skills were tuned to detect snakes in early primates. Past experiments confronted the SDT by measuring how fast primate subjects detected snake pictures among non-dangerous distractors (e.g., flowers), but did not include pictures of primates’ other predators, such as carnivorans, raptors, and crocodilians. Here, we examined the detection abilities of N = 19 Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana) and N = 6 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to spot different predators. By implementing an oddity task protocol, we recorded success rates and reaction times to locate a deviant picture among four pictures over more than 400,000 test trials. Pictures depicted a predator, a non-predator animal, or a simple geometric shape. The first task consisted of detecting a deviant picture among identical distractor pictures (discrimination) and the second task was designed to evaluate detection abilities of a deviant picture among different distractor pictures (categorization). The macaques detected pictures of geometric shapes better and faster than pictures of animals, and were better and faster at discriminating than categorizing. The macaques did not detect snakes better or faster than other animal categories. Overall, these results suggest that pictures of snakes do not capture visual attention more than other predators, questioning previous findings in favor of the SDT.

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Data and code availability

The datasets analyzed during the current study as well as the R scripts are available from the corresponding author on request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Initiative Biodiversité, Évolution, Écologie, Société (IBEES), the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN), the Université de Strasbourg and the Centre de Primatologie de l’Université de Strasbourg – Silabe (www.silabe.com) for funding the research project, technical support and expert animal care. We are grateful to Christof Neumann for significant help with the data analysis and suggestions on the manuscript.

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Initiative Biodiversité, Évolution, Écologie, Société (France) and the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle (France) to Cécile Garcia and Karl Zeller, by the Université de Strasbourg (France) to Sébastien Ballesta and Hélène Meunier and by the Centre de Primatologie de l’Université de Strasbourg (France), Silabe to Adam Rimele.

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Contributions

Original idea: KZ, CG, and SB. Conceptualization and writing of the first version of the manuscript: KZ. Collection and editing of stimuli: KZ. Coding of the cognitive task, data collection and data management: KZ, SB and AR. Statistical analyses: KZ. All authors contributed to the elaboration of the research questions and to the methodology. All authors contributed to writing and approved the submitted version.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Karl Zeller.

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Conflict of interest

The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Ethical approval

Silabe’s (SBEA, https://silabe.com/) internal ethics committee reviewed the project and declared that the protocol had no negative impact on animals in the sense of Directive 2010/63/EU and therefore validated the implementation of the project. The decision was taken during the meeting archived under the name “SBEA 2022–03”. Silabe is authorized to house non-human primates (registration n°B6732636).

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Zeller, K., Ballesta, S., Meunier, H. et al. Spot the odd one out: do snake pictures capture macaques’ attention more than other predators?. Anim Cogn 26, 1945–1958 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01831-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01831-9

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