Dogs Can Discriminate Emotional Expressions of Human Faces
Dogs Can Discriminate Emotional Expressions of Human Faces
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cub.2014.12.055
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发表时间：
2015-03-02
期刊：
影响因子：
9.2
通讯作者：
Huber, Ludwig
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Mueller, Corsin A.;Schmitt, Kira;Huber, Ludwig
动物是否有情感并对他人的情感表达做出反应的问题在过去十年中已成为研究的焦点[1-9]。然而，到目前为止，还没有研究令人信服地表明，动物对异性的情感表达有区别，排除了它们对简单线索做出反应的可能性。在这里，我们表明，狗使用的情绪作为一种歧视性的线索。在学会区分15对图片中的快乐和愤怒的人脸之后，其中一组只显示了上半部分的脸，另一组只显示了下半部分的脸，狗用四种类型的探测试验进行了测试：（1）与训练中相同但为新面孔的面孔的一半，（2）训练中使用的面孔的另一半，（3）新面孔的另一半，（4）训练中使用的左半边脸。我们发现，得到快乐表情奖励的狗比得到愤怒表情奖励的狗更快地学会了辨别。如果狗把愤怒的脸识别为厌恶的刺激，就可以预测到这一点。此外，狗在所有四个探针条件下的表现显着高于机会水平，从而将训练偶然性转移到与训练集仅共享情感表达作为区别特征的新刺激。我们的结论是，狗使用它们对真实的情感人脸的记忆来完成辨别任务。
The question of whether animals have emotions and respond to the emotional expressions of others has become a focus of research in the last decade [1-9]. However, to date, no study has convincingly shown that animals discriminate between emotional expressions of heterospecifics, excluding the possibility that they respond to simple cues. Here, we show that dogs use the emotion of a heterospecific as a discriminative cue. After learning to discriminate between happy and angry human faces in 15 picture pairs, whereby for one group only the upper halves of the faces were shown and for the other group only the lower halves of the faces were shown, dogs were tested with four types of probe trials: (1) the same half of the faces as in the training but of novel faces, (2) the other half of the faces used in training, (3) the other half of novel faces, and (4) the left half of the faces used in training. We found that dogs for which the happy faces were rewarded learned the discrimination more quickly than dogs for which the angry faces were rewarded. This would be predicted if the dogs recognized an angry face as an aversive stimulus. Furthermore, the dogs performed significantly above chance level in all four probe conditions and thus transferred the training contingency to novel stimuli that shared with the training set only the emotional expression as a distinguishing feature. We conclude that the dogs used their memories of real emotional human faces to accomplish the discrimination task.