Animated Chimps Make Real Chimps Yawn

Everyone knows that yawning is contagious. When inside a small group, when one of the members yawns, someone else is bound to do so as well, unconsciously. While some experts are focusing their research on finding out why we, humans, do so, others try to find out if the same habit exists in other species as well. Scientists from the Emory University Yerkes National Primate Research Center have determined that chimpanzees catch the “bug” as well, but with a twist. They can also be made to yawn by simply watching an animation of another chimp on a screen, LiveScience reports.

“We know humans often empathize with fictional displays of behavior, including those in cartoons and video games, even though the displays are obviously artificial,” Matthew Campbell, the lead researcher of the new study, says. “Humans experience emotional engagement with characters, empathizing with happiness, sadness or other emotions displayed by the characters.” Over the years, experiments have shown that other primates can catch yawns as well, and also that dogs can be influenced by human yawning too.

In their new study, the EU experts created groups of chimps, which were then made to watch videos. The primates that looked at the screen showing controlled mouth movements that had nothing to do with yawning were noticed to engage in this behavior much less frequently than those looking at animations of other chimps yawning. The main goal of these experiments is basically to develop a new theory on why the behavior is transmitted, beyond empathy. Detailed results of the new experiments were published in last week's issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“Because they showed only involuntary responses to the animations, we believe they empathized with the animations, while knowing they were artificial. This is important for us to know because we can present animations in future experiments knowing the chimpanzees will identify with the animations as if they are other chimpanzees. This opens up the possibility of using animations in many other types of studies,” Campbell concludes.