By Bruce Bower
The brain saves face similarly in chimpanzees and people, and possibly in macaque monkeys as well. Chimps recognize their compatriots’ faces by utilizing many of the same brain regions that have already been linked to people’s ability to identify familiar faces, a new study suggests.
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Neural regions that enable efficient discrimination of one individual’s face from another’s may have evolved between 8 million and 6 million years ago in a common ancestor of chimps and humans, propose psychobiologist Lisa Parr of Emory University in Atlanta and her colleagues. Similar neural elements of face discrimination also appear in macaques, another study finds, suggesting that this ability evolved even earlier.
Parr’s group has already conducted studies indicating that chimps recognize other chimps’ faces nearly as well as people recognize other people’s faces. “For the most part, similar brain regions are responsible for this ability in chimps and humans,” Parr says. In her work, macaques’ proficiency at face recognition falls short of that displayed by chimps.