Great ape infants' face touching and its role in social engagement.

ABSTRACT: Touch has a key role in the social development of infant primates and in the regulation of social interactions, even so, there's a rarity of studies on infants' use of social touch. In this work, we document chimpanzee infants and human infants' touching of other's faces, a behavior already described in wild capuchin monkey infants, and investigate possible functions of infants' social touch. A strength of this study is that we sampled chimpanzee and human infants from three different social ecologies each. Each infant was observed naturalistically, in their everyday environments. In 36 h of observation, we found 269 touch events, specifically 222 face touches and 47 head touches. We found significant differences between groups, within species. Face touching occurred preferentially with ad

SUBMITTER: Felicio B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11799006 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature