Yawning Is Contagious, Even When Watching Cartoons
According to a BBC News article by Victoria Gill, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia have discovered that chimpanzees will yawn after watching animated chimpanzees yawn. They hope to use this information to learn how human children process what they see on a screen, as well as how they empathize with the feelings of other people:
Although Dr Campbell doesn’t think the chimps were “fooled” by the animations into thinking they were looking at real chimps, he explained that there was evidence that chimpanzees “process animated faces the same way they process photographs of faces”.
He said: “It’s not a real chimpanzee, but it kind of looks like a chimpanzee, and they’re responding to that.”….
In his future work, Dr Campbell would like to pin down exactly how these measurable behaviours are related to the more difficult to measure phenomenon of empathy.
“We’d like to know more about behaviours related to empathy, like consolation – when an individual does something nice to the victim of aggression,” he told BBC News.
“So we want to see if our good contagious yawners are also good consolers.”
Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
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Lady Chimps will Mate for Meat
Researchers in the Tai National Park in West Africa found that in a study of 262 chimpanzees, male chimpanzees favored giving food to females that were in heat and ready to mate:
Gomes and co-author Christophe Boesch observed all of this while studying wild chimpanzees in the Tai National Park at the Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa. The chimp group — consisting of 49 individuals total — included five adult males and 14 adult females, which were the focus of the study published in the latest PLoS One.
The researchers recorded 262 male to female meat transfers, with the meat mostly coming from red colobus monkeys. Chimps also kill other types of monkeys, duikers and small mammals.
Gomes and Boesch collected data on matings, observing the same number — 262 — during times when females were in estrous. The scientists noted that males would share with all types of females, whether in estrous or not, although the former received preference.
“After all,” Gomes said, “males double their mating success by sharing meat with females, and this is a potentially enormous benefit.”
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Chimpanzee Riding On A Segway
Japanese television is one of the best things in the world. Pair it with another stupidly catching internet song and you have an instant hit -especially when the video and song emphasize the wonder that is created when a chimpanzee rides on a segway.
Link via Mental Floss
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