Amazing stuff! Truly stunning!
"Apes recognize photos of groupmates they haven't seen for more than 25 years and respond even more enthusiastically to pictures of their friends, a new study finds. ..."
From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
While human social memory lasts decades and tracks relationships, less is known about nonhuman ape long-term memory.We present evidence that both chimpanzees and bonobos recognize the faces of familiar conspecifics even after many years of separation. An eye-tracking task revealed that apes’ attention was biased toward former groupmates over strangers, and this pattern may persist for at least 26 y beyond separation. Apes’ memory may also represent the quality of their social relationships: Apes looked longer toward individuals with whom they had more positive relationships.Thus, critical properties of human memory may reflect deep homologies with other apes, likely providing the foundation for the emergence of complex cooperative relationships that operate across long time-scales.
Abstract
Recognition and memory of familiar conspecifics provides the foundation for complex sociality and is vital to navigating an unpredictable social world ... Human social memory incorporates content about interactions and relationships and can last for decades ... Long-term social memory likely played a key role throughout human evolution, as our ancestors increasingly built relationships that operated across distant space and time ... Although individual recognition is widespread among animals and sometimes lasts for years, little is known about social memory in nonhuman apes and the shared evolutionary foundations of human social memory. In a preferential-looking eye-tracking task, we presented chimpanzees and bonobos (N = 26) with side-by-side images of a previous groupmate and a conspecific stranger of the same sex. Apes’ attention was biased toward former groupmates, indicating long-term memory for past social partners. The strength of biases toward former groupmates was not impacted by the duration apart, and our results suggest that recognition may persist for at least 26 y beyond separation. We also found significant but weak evidence that, like humans, apes may remember the quality or content of these past relationships: apes’ looking biases were stronger for individuals with whom they had more positive histories of social interaction. Long-lasting social memory likely provided key foundations for the evolution of human culture and sociality as they extended across time, space, and group boundaries."
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