Revisiting the baby schema by a geometric morphometric analysis of infant facial characteristics across great apes.

ABSTRACT: Infants across species are thought to exhibit specific facial features (termed the "baby schema", such as a relatively bigger forehead and eyes, and protruding cheeks), with an adaptive function to induce caretaking behaviour from adults. There is abundant empirical evidence for this in humans, but, surprisingly, the existence of a baby schema in non-human animals has not been scientifically demonstrated. We investigated which facial characteristics are shared across infants in five species of great apes: humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, mountain gorillas, and Bornean orangutans. We analysed eight adult and infant faces for each species (80 images in total) using geometric morphometric analysis and machine learning. We found two principal components characterizing infant faces consistently ob

SUBMITTER: Kawaguchi Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10060388 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature