Detection of affective facial expression in a chimpanzee: An event-related potential study
Friday, March 15, 2013 - 08:30
in Biology & Nature
The chimpanzee brain responds to pictures depicting affective facial expressions of another chimpanzee. A research team led by Program-Specific Associate Professor Satoshi Hirata (Primate Research Institute), in collaboration with the Hayashibara Great Ape Research Institute and the University of Tokyo, measured the brainwaves of an adult female chimpanzee when she was observing pictures of chimpanzees showing affective expressions (affective pictures) and pictures without affective expressions (neutral pictures). The results showed that the brain waveforms in response to affective pictures differed from those for neutral pictures around 210 ms (0.21 sec) post-stimulus.