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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
Why do we yawn? Andrew Gallup, a researcher at Bingham University, explained that we yawn to prevent our brains from overheating:
If your head is overheated, there’s a good chance you’ll yawn soon, according to a new study that found the primary purpose of yawning is to control brain temperature.
The finding solves several mysteries about yawning, such as why it’s most commonly done just before and after sleeping, why certain diseases lead to excessive yawning, and why breathing through the nose and cooling off the forehead often stop yawning.
The key yawn instigator appears to be brain temperature.
"Brains are like computers," Andrew Gallup, a researcher in the Department of Biology at Binghamton University who led the study, told Discovery News. "They operate most efficiently when cool, and physical adaptations have evolved to allow maximum cooling of the
brain."
Link – Thanks Geekazoid!
(That’s a cute baby named Livia, yawning like a lion. Photo: patata1017 [Flickr])
