ArticleRoyal Society open science2022
Staring death in the face: chimpanzees' attention towards conspecific skulls and the implications of a face module guiding their behaviour.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- On the nature of grief: uncovering the evolutionary roots of loss across the animal realm.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Dissecting disgust and fear in chimpanzees: From facilitation to disruption of cognitive processes.iScience · 2026Article
- Necrophilic behaviour in wild stump-tailed macaques (Macaca arctoides).Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Staring death in the face: chimpanzees' attention towards conspecific skulls and the implications of a face module guiding their behaviour.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Chimpanzees exhibit a variety of behaviours surrounding their dead, although much less is known about how they respond towards conspecific skeletons. We tested chimpanzees' visual attention to images of conspecific and non-conspecific stimuli (cat/chimp/dog/rat), shown simultaneously in four corners of a screen in distinct orientations (frontal/diagonal/lateral) of either one of three types (faces/skulls/skull-shaped stones). Additionally, we compared their visual attention towards chimpanzee-only stimuli (faces/skulls/skull-shaped stones). Lastly, we tested their attention towards specific regions of chimpanzee skulls. We theorized that chimpanzee skulls retaining face-like features would be perceived similarly to chimpanzee faces and thus be subjected to similar biases. Overall, supporting our hypotheses, the chimpanzees preferred conspecific-related stimuli. The results showed that chimpanzees attended: (i) significantly longer towards conspecific skulls than other species skulls (particularly in forward-facing and to a lesser extent diagonal orientations); (ii) significantly longer towards conspecific faces than other species faces at forward-facing and diagonal orientations; (iii) longer towards chimpanzee faces compared with chimpanzee skulls and skull-shaped stones, and (iv) attended significantly longer to the teeth, similar to findings for elephants. We suggest that chimpanzee skulls retain relevant, face-like features that arguably activate a domain-specific face module in chimpanzees' brains, guiding their attention.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.