Zoo housed meerkats do not recognise human emotions

Domestic mammals can categorically process and respond functionally to human emotional cues. However, to date, it is unclear whether this ability is underlaid by shared mammal emotional processing, associative learning through exposure to humans, or has arisen through the domestication process. To disambiguate these hypotheses, we investigated whether zoo-housed meerkats (Suricata suricatta), who have not undergone the process of domestication but are regularly exposed to human contact, recognise human emotions, and whether this is modulated by human interaction levels. 35 meerkats were exposed to human emotional expressions (happy, sad, fearful and neutral) to assess their behavioural responses, and a cross-modal paradigm was used to examine expectancy violation responses when presented with emotionally incongruent signal pairs. While isolated findings suggest human interaction level modulated some behavioural responses to the test paradigms, no patterns of functional responses, lateralised processing, or cross-modal integration consistent with those documented in domestic mammals emerged, either for the whole study population or for those meerkats with a history of close interaction with humans. Thus, zoo-housed meerkats do not show strong evidence of human emotion recognition. Our findings support the hypothesis that the capacity for human emotion recognition in domestic species has arisen through artificial selection for attention to human communicative cues.