It seems like not only have their hands evolved way more than ours throughout evolution, but even their way of processing others is similar to ours. Chimpanzees are highly social animals, often living in communities with as many as 50 members, though groups of over a hundred are not unheard of. This requires quite a lot of mental processing power to be able to identify each individual, especially in the dark, shadowy rainforests of central Africa. So how do they do it? It turns out that chimps manage facial recognition in a similar way to humans. Researchers from Kyoto University, Japan, set out to test how chimps search for faces hidden among other objects, and what impacts their ability to do so. They tested three adult female chimps, getting them to select the faces of unknown apes from a randomized selection of other objects such as trees, rocks and trumpets. The apes were easily able to achieve this, and the amount of time it took them to correctly select a face remained roughly the same throughout the experiment, ruling out the possibility of “overlearning.” However, as soon as the faces of the chimps were obscured or altered, for example turning them upside down, their ability dropped significantly. The results of the study, published in Scientific Reports, suggest that the apes use what’s called “holistic processing,” where they make a quick rapid analysis of the information that forms a face. As faces convey all sorts of vital information that is critical for highly social animals, the ability to rapidly recognize faces is of great advantage.This suggests that chimpanzees recognize and identify faces in a similar way to how some people believe newborn babies do. Newborns naturally orient towards faces, and some evidence has shown that they might do this by recognizing “three high-contrasting blobs corresponding to the approximate location of the eyes and mouth,” or an inverted triangle layout.
