1:00 - 6:15 p.m., Saturday, December 19,

9:00 a.m. - 4:10 p.m., Sunday, December 20, 2009

Large Conference Room, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University,

Inuyama, Aichi, Japan

You can download the program from the icon below (Updated 2009-12-18).

Speakers:

Hyun-joo Song (Yonsei University)

Yusuke Moriguchi (Joetsu University of Education)

Jane Kiley Hamlin (Yale University)

Takaaki Kaneko (Kyoto University)

Shinya Yamamoto (University of Tokyo; Great Ape Research Institute, Hayashibara)

Jennifer J. Pokorny (Yerkes National Primate Research Center)

Pier Francesco Ferrari (University of Parma)

Harumi Kobayashi (Tokyo Denki University)

Hiromi Kusumoto (Kyushu University)

Nozomi Naoi (JST; Kyoto University)

Yuriko Oshima-Takane (McGill University)

Naoko Tokimoto (RIKEN BSI)

Yo Morimoto (Kyoto University)

Naotaka Fujii (RIKEN BSI)

Fumihiro Kano (Kyoto University)

Shun Itagaki (University of Tokyo)

Koji Kuraoka (Kyoto University)

Christoph D. Dahl (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics)

Organizers (Kyoto University): Masaki Tomonaga, Misato Hayashi, Ikuma Adachi, Tomoko Matsui (Primate Research Institute), Shoji Itakura (Graduate School of Letters), Masayuki Tanaka (Wildlife Research Center), Masako Myowa (Graduate School of Education)

Collaborators: Kazuo Hiraki (University of Tokyo), Motoaki Sugiura (Tohoku University), Atsushi Sato (University of Toyama)

Hosted by Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University and Kyoto University Global COE Program: Revitalizing Education for Dynamic Hearts and Minds

Contact: Masaki Tomonaga ()

This symposium is also announced in the webpage of the institute (in Japanese).

Tomonaga, M., & Imura, T. (2009). Faces capture the visuospatial attention of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Evidence from a cueing experiment. Frontiers in Zoology, 6, 14. (DOI:10.1186/1742-9994-6-14)

Background

Faces, as socially relevant stimuli, readily capture human visuospatial attention. Although faces also play important roles in the social lives of chimpanzees, the closest living species to humans, the way in which faces are attentionally processed remains unclear from a comparative-cognitive perspective. In the present study, three young chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were tested with a simple manual response task in which various kinds of photographs, including faces as non-informative cues, were followed by a target.

Results

When the target appeared at the location that had been occupied by the face immediately before target onset, response times were significantly faster than when the target appeared at the opposite location that had been by the other object. Such an advantage was not observed when a photograph of a banana was paired with the other object. Furthermore, this attentional capture was also observed when upright human faces were presented, indicating that this effect is not limited to own-species faces. On the contrary, when the participants were tested with inverted chimpanzee faces, this effect was rather weakened, suggesting the specificity to upright faces.

Conclusion

Chimpanzee's visuospatial attention was easily captured by the face stimuli. This effect was face specific and stronger for upright faces than inverted. These results are consistent with those from typically developing humans.

Martinez, L., & Matsuzawa, T. (2009). Visual and auditory conditional position discrimination in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Behavioural Processes, 82, 90-94. (DOI:10.1016/j.beproc.2009.03.010)

Chimpanzee cognition has been studied predominantly through the visual modality, and much less through the auditory modality. The aim of this study was to explore possible differences in chimpanzees' processing of visual and auditory stimuli. We developed a new conditional position discrimination (CPD) task requiring the association between a stimulus (from either the auditory or the visual modality), and a spatial position (left or right). The stimuli consisted of the face and voice of two individuals well known to the subjects (one chimpanzee and one human). Six chimpanzees participated in both the visual and the auditory conditions. We found contrasting results between the two conditions: the subjects acquired the CPD more easily in the visual than in the auditory condition. This supports previous findings on the difficulties encountered by chimpanzees in learning tasks involving auditory stimuli. Our experiments also revealed individual differences: the chimpanzee with the most extensive experience in symbolic visual matching tasks showed good performance in both conditions. In contrast, the chimpanzee expert in an auditory-visual intermodal matching task showed no sign of learning in either condition. Future work should focus on finding the most appropriate procedure for exploring chimpanzees' auditory-visual cognitive skills.

Keywords: Auditory; Chimpanzee; Discrimination; Visual

Haslam, M., Hernandez-Aguilar, A., Ling, V., Carvalho, S., de la Torre, I., DeStefano, A., Du, A., Hardy, B., Harris, J., Marchant, L., Matsuzawa, T., McGrew, W., Mercader, J., Mora, R., Petraglia, M., Roche, H., Visalberghi, E., & Warren, R. (2009). Primate archaeology. Nature, 460, 339-344. (DOI:10.1038/nature08188)

All modern humans use tools to overcome limitations of our anatomy and to make difficult tasks easier. However, if tool use is such an advantage, we may ask why it is not evolved to the same degree in other species. To answer this question, we need to bring a long-term perspective to the material record of other members of our own order, the Primates.

Adachi, I., Chou, D. P., & Hampton, R. R. (2009). Thatcher effect in monkeys demonstrates conservation of face perception across primates. Current Biology, online. (DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2009.05.067)

Accurate recognition of individuals is a foundation of social cognition. The remarkable ability of humans to distinguish among thousands of similar faces depends on sensitivity to unique configurations of facial features, including subtle differences in the relative placement of the eyes and mouth [1,2]. Determining whether similar perceptual processes underlie individual recognition in nonhuman primates is important for both the study of cognitive evolution and the appropriate use of primate models in social cognition research. In humans, some of the best evidence for a keen sensitivity to the configuration of features in faces comes from the Thatcher effect. This effect shows that it is difficult to detect changes in the orientation of the eyes and mouth in an image of an inverted face, even though identical changes are unmistakable in an upright face [3,4]. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that a nonhuman primate species also exhibits the Thatcher effect. This direct evidence of configural face perception in monkeys, collected under testing conditions that closely parallel those used with humans, indicates that perceptual mechanisms for individual recognition have been conserved through primate cognitive evolution.

Matsuzawa, T. (2009). Symbolic representation of number in chimpanzees. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. (DOI:10.1016/j.conb.2009.04.007)

This paper aims to summarize the existing evidence for the symbolic representation of number in chimpanzees. Chimpanzees can represent, to some extent, both the cardinal and the ordinal aspect of number. Through the medium of Arabic numerals we compared working memory in humans and chimpanzees using the same apparatus and following the same procedure. Three young chimpanzees outperformed human adults in memorizing briefly presented numerals. However, we found that chimpanzees were less proficient at a variety of other cognitive tasks including imitation, cross-modal matching, symmetry of symbols and referents, and one-to-one correspondence. In sum, chimpanzees do not possess human-like capabilities for representation at an abstract level. The present paper will discuss the constraints of the number concept in chimpanzees, and illuminate some unique features of human cognition.

Hockings, K. J., Anderson, J. R., & Matsuzawa, T. (2009). Use of wild and cultivated foods by chimpanzees at Bossou, Republic of Guinea: Feeding dynamics in a human-influenced environment. American Journal of Primatology, online. (DOI:10.1002/ajp.20698)

Key words: crop-raiding; chimpanzees; cultivated food availability; wild food availability; conflict mitigation

Increased human population growth and more conversions of natural habitat to agricultural land have resulted in greater proximity between humans and nonhuman primate species. Consequent increases in resource competition including crop-raiding are a by-product of both natural resources becoming less available and the nutritional benefits of cultivated foods becoming more known to the nonhuman primates. Chimpanzees at Bossou in the Republic of Guinea, West Africa, consume 17 different types of cultivated foods that are grown extensively throughout their small, fragmented home range. Direct observations of feeding behavior conducted over an 18-month period revealed that during specific months crops account for up to one quarter of chimpanzee feeding time, with higher overall crop-raiding levels throughout the periods of wild fruit scarcity. Some cultivated foods, especially sugar fruits, are mostly fallback foods, whereas others, such as rice pith (Oryza sp.) and maize (Zea mays), are consumed according to their availability even when wild foods are abundant. These findings highlight the importance of both crop choice by farmers and a thorough understanding of the ecology of resident primate species when establishing land management techniques for alleviating human-primate conflict.

Matsuzawa, T. (2009). Q & A: Tetsuro Matsuzawa. Current Biology, 19, R310-R312. (DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2009.02.001)

Weiss, A., Inoue-Murayama, M., Hong, K.-W., Inoue, E., Udono, T., Ochiai, T., Matsuzawa, T., Hirata, S., & King, J. E. (2009). Assessing chimpanzee personality and subjective well-being in Japan. American Journal of Primatology, 71, 283-292. (DOI:10.1002/ajp.20649)

Keywords: chimpanzee; personality; well-being; culture; age; sex

We tested whether the cultural background of raters influenced ratings of chimpanzee personality. Our study involved comparing personality and subjective well-being ratings of 146 chimpanzees in Japan that were housed in zoos, research institutes, and a retirement sanctuary to ratings of chimpanzees in US and Australian zoos. Personality ratings were made on a translated and expanded version of a questionnaire used to rate chimpanzees in the US and Australia. Subjective well-being ratings were made on a translated version of a questionnaire used to rate chimpanzees in the US and Australia. The mean interrater reliabilities of the 43 original adjectives did not markedly differ between the present sample and the original sample of 100 zoo chimpanzees in the US. Interrater reliabilities of these samples were highly correlated, suggesting that their rank order was preserved. Comparison of the factor structures for the Japanese sample and for the original sample of chimpanzees in US zoos indicated that the overall structure was replicated and that the Dominance, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness domains clearly generalized. Consistent with earlier studies, older chimpanzees had higher Dominance and lower Extraversion and Openness scores. Correlations between the six domain scores and subjective well-being were comparable to those for chimpanzees housed in the US and Australia. These findings suggest that chimpanzee personality ratings are not affected by the culture of the raters.

Kano, F., & Tomonaga, M. (2009). How chimpanzees look at pictures: A comparative eye-tracking study. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, online. (DOI:10.1098/rspb.2008.1811)

Surprisingly little is known about the eye movements of chimpanzees, despite the potential contribution of such knowledge to comparative cognition studies. Here, we present the first examination of eye tracking in chimpanzees. We recorded the eye movements of chimpanzees as they viewed naturalistic pictures containing a full-body image of a chimpanzee, a human or another mammal; results were compared with those from humans. We found a striking similarity in viewing patterns between the two species. Both chimpanzees and humans looked at the animal figures for longer than at the background and at the face region for longer than at other parts of the body. The face region was detected at first sight by both species when they were shown pictures of chimpanzees and of humans. However, the eye movements of chimpanzees also exhibited distinct differences from those of humans; the former shifted the fixation location more quickly and more broadly than the latter. In addition, the average duration of fixation on the face region was shorter in chimpanzees than in humans. Overall, our results clearly demonstrate the eye-movement strategies common to the two primate species and also suggest several notable differences manifested during the observation of pictures of scenes and body forms.

Keywords: chimpanzee; eye movement; eye tracking; face; scene