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      Sheep recognize familiar and unfamiliar human faces from two-dimensional images

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          Abstract

          One of the most important human social skills is the ability to recognize faces. Humans recognize familiar faces easily, and can learn to identify unfamiliar faces from repeatedly presented images. Sheep are social animals that can recognize other sheep as well as familiar humans. Little is known, however, about their holistic face-processing abilities. In this study, we trained eight sheep ( Ovis aries) to recognize the faces of four celebrities from photographic portraits displayed on computer screens. After training, the sheep chose the ‘learned-familiar’ faces rather than the unfamiliar faces significantly above chance. We then tested whether the sheep could recognize the four celebrity faces if they were presented in different perspectives. This ability has previously been shown only in humans. Sheep successfully recognized the four celebrity faces from tilted images. Interestingly, there was a drop in performance with the tilted images (from 79.22 ± 7.5% to 66.5 ± 4.1%) of a magnitude similar to that seen when humans perform this task. Finally, we asked whether sheep could recognize a very familiar handler from photographs. Sheep identified the handler in 71.8 ± 2.3% of the trials without pretraining. Together these data show that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, comparable with those of humans and non-human primates.

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          Most cited references56

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          Recognizing emotion from facial expressions: psychological and neurological mechanisms.

          Recognizing emotion from facial expressions draws on diverse psychological processes implemented in a large array of neural structures. Studies using evoked potentials, lesions, and functional imaging have begun to elucidate some of the mechanisms. Early perceptual processing of faces draws on cortices in occipital and temporal lobes that construct detailed representations from the configuration of facial features. Subsequent recognition requires a set of structures, including amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, that links perceptual representations of the face to the generation of knowledge about the emotion signaled, a complex set of mechanisms using multiple strategies. Although recent studies have provided a wealth of detail regarding these mechanisms in the adult human brain, investigations are also being extended to nonhuman primates, to infants, and to patients with psychiatric disorders.
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            Human neural systems for face recognition and social communication.

            Face perception is mediated by a distributed neural system in humans that consists of multiple, bilateral regions. The functional organization of this system embodies a distinction between the representation of invariant aspects of faces, which is the basis for recognizing individuals, and the representation of changeable aspects, such as eye gaze, expression, and lip movement, which underlies the perception of information that facilitates social communication. The system also has a hierarchical organization. A core system, consisting of occipitotemporal regions in extrastriate visual cortex, mediates the visual analysis of faces. An extended system consists of regions from neural systems for other cognitive functions that can act in concert with the core system to extract meaning from faces. Of regions in the extended system for face perception, the amygdala plays a central role in processing the social relevance of information gleaned from faces, particularly when that information may signal a potential threat.
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              Individual recognition: it is good to be different.

              Individual recognition (IR) behavior has been widely studied, uncovering spectacular recognition abilities across a range of taxa and modalities. Most studies of IR focus on the recognizer (receiver). These studies typically explore whether a species is capable of IR, the cues that are used for recognition and the specializations that receivers use to facilitate recognition. However, relatively little research has explored the other half of the communication equation: the individual being recognized (signaler). Provided there is a benefit to being accurately identified, signalers are expected to actively broadcast their identity with distinctive cues. Considering the prevalence of IR, there are probably widespread benefits associated with distinctiveness. As a result, selection for traits that reveal individual identity might represent an important and underappreciated selective force contributing to the evolution and maintenance of genetic polymorphisms.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                R Soc Open Sci
                R Soc Open Sci
                RSOS
                royopensci
                Royal Society Open Science
                The Royal Society Publishing
                2054-5703
                November 2017
                8 November 2017
                8 November 2017
                : 4
                : 11
                : 171228
                Affiliations
                Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge , Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DY, UK
                Author notes
                Author for correspondence: A. Jennifer Morton e-mail: ajm41@ 123456cam.ac.uk
                [†]

                Present address: Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, 18b Trumpington Road, Cambridge CB2 8AH, UK.

                Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.3911908.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0181-6346
                Article
                rsos171228
                10.1098/rsos.171228
                5717684
                31417703
                3fc49901-d65d-4c73-9dc9-9beb3faad9fb
                © 2017 The Authors.

                Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 25 August 2017
                : 4 October 2017
                Funding
                Funded by: CHDI Foundation, http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100005725;
                Categories
                1001
                14
                42
                Biology (Whole Organism)
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                November, 2017

                sheep,learning,cognitive testing
                sheep, learning, cognitive testing

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