Fascinerande ny forskning av Jennifer Pokorny och Frans de Waal, ”Monkeys Recognize the Faces of Group Mates in Photographs”, publicerad i PNAS, visar följande:

Can nonhuman primates recognize familiar individuals in photographs? Such facial identification was examined in brown or tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), a New World primate, by letting subjects categorize facial images of conspecifics as either belonging to the in-group or out-group. After training on an oddity task with four images on a touch screen, subjects correctly identified one in-group member as odd among three out-group members, and vice versa. They generalized this knowledge to both new images of the same individuals and images of juveniles never presented before, thus suggesting facial identification based on real-life experience with the depicted individuals. This ability was unexplained by potential color cues because the same results were obtained with grayscale images. These tests demonstrate that capuchin monkeys, like humans, recognize whom they see in a picture.

Detta med att känna igen personer i den egna gruppen är intressant, för jag upplever mig ha svårare att minnas och skilja mellan ansikten hos personer som tillhör andra grupper än den egna, t.ex. asiater och svarta.