Familiarity mediates apes' attentional biases toward human faces

In zoos, primates experience markedly different interactions with familiar humans, such as the zookeepers who care for them, compared with those with unfamiliar humans, such as the large volume of zoo visitors to whom they are regularly exposed. While the behaviour of zoo-housed primates in the presence of unfamiliar, and to a lesser extent familiar, humans has received considerable attention, if and how they spontaneously distinguish familiar from unfamiliar people, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the relationships they form with familiar and unfamiliar humans, remain poorly understood. Using a dot-probe paradigm, we assessed whether primates (chimpanzees and gorillas) show an attentional bias toward the faces of familiar humans, with whom the apes presumably had a positive relationship. Contrary to our predictions, all subjects showed a significant attentional bias toward unfamiliar people's faces compared with familiar people's faces when the faces showed a neutral expression, both with and without a surgical face mask on, but no significant attentional bias when the faces showed a surprised expression. These results demonstrate that apes can spontaneously categorize humans based on familiarity and we argue that the attentional biases the apes showed for unfamiliar human faces reflect a novelty effect.