Giant pandas can discriminate the emotions of human facial pictures

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) can discriminate face-like shapes, but little is known about their cognitive ability with respect to the emotional expressions of humans. We tested whether adult giant pandas can discriminate expressions from pictures of half of a face and found that pandas can learn to discriminate between angry and happy expressions based on global information from the whole face. Young adult pandas (5–7 years old) learned to discriminate expressions more quickly than older individuals (8–16 years old), but no significant differences were found between females and males. These results suggest that young adult giant pandas are better at discriminating emotional expressions of humans. We showed for the first time that the giant panda, can discriminate the facial expressions of humans. Our results can also be valuable for the daily care and management of captive giant pandas.

Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans

“…Instead, the configural processing of familiar faces in dogs (Pitteri et al 2014) is here extended to facial expressions. Configural processing (sensu Bruce and Young 2012) is early and well developed in humans (de Heering et al 2007), and found in varied taxa, including chimpanzees (Parr et al 2008), sheep (Kendrick et al 1996), pandas (Li et al 2017), and even bees (Dyer 2005). Therefore, if this is an ancient mechanism in animals, which is subjected to perceptual narrowing with stimulus familiarity (Sugita 2008), we suggest that dogs employ the same mechanism under a social learning strategy for crossspecies emotion perception.…”

Viewing heterospecific facial expressions: an eye-tracking study of human and monkey viewers

“…Even though it has been reported that humans can recognize some facial expressions in monkeys (Marechal et al 2017) and dogs (Tam and Gallagher 2009; Wan et al 2012), and some basic human facial expressions (e.g. happy vs anger) can be discriminated by monkeys (Kanazawa 1996), dogs (Müller et al 2015; Albuquerque et al 2016 ) , horses (Proops et al 2018), goats (Nawroth et al 2018) and giant pandas (Li et al 2017), we still do not know whether the same cognitive process (e.g. face-viewing gaze allocation) is adopted to process conspecific and heterospecific facial expressions in these species.…”

Animals Remember Previous Facial Expressions that Specific Humans Have Exhibited

“…For humans, facial expressions are important social signals, and how we perceive specific individuals may be influenced by subtle emotional cues that they have given us in past encounters. A wide range of animal species are also capable of discriminating the emotions of others through facial expressions [1][2][3][4][5], and it is clear that remembering emotional experiences with specific individuals could have clear benefits for social bonding and aggression avoidance when these individuals are encountered again. Although there is evidence that non-human animals are capable of remembering the identity of individuals who have directly harmed them [6,7], it is not known whether animals can form lasting memories of specific individuals simply by observing subtle emotional expressions that they exhibit on their faces.…”