Just from a face we can tell who a person is, whether they are male or female, and what their mood is. And sometimes we can tell who their relatives are. I wonder whether chimpanzees see faces as we do. From our earlier experiments at Yerkes Primate Research Center, we knew that chimpanzees are very good at recognizing faces. Now we wondered if they could recognize whether chimpanzees were from the same family, such as a mother and a son.
Chimpanzees are one of the most intelligent species of animal.
Each is about 10 years old. That's about as old as a teenager in human terms. Over the last five years, they have become really good at playing video games. Because these chimps were good at video games, we set up a kin recognition experiment using a video-game approach. We wanted to text whether our chimps could correctly match a photo of a mother chimpanzee to a photo of her child, or offspring.