What do you see in the great apes' eyes?
Résumé
Humans can extract information from the faces and gazes of other humans. They can discriminate between external attention (on physical or social environment) and internal attention (recollection, mind wandering) by watching video recordings of faces (Benedek et al; 2018). Do these abilities extend to reading the type of attention (external or internal) on the faces of other species phylogenetically close to humans such as great apes? Our
study aims to confirm the human ability to read the type of attention from human faces and gazes and explore whether this ability also applies to reading the type of attention from the faces and gazes of chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans. The protocol is the following: videos (5 sec) of human, chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan faces are presented to participants.
Participants must then choose between Internal attention or External attention for each stimulus, in a forced choice paradigm.
Currently we are finalizing our study and the results will presented at the ECBB conference.