Spot the odd one out: do snake pictures capture macaques’ attention more than other predators?

• Published in: Animal cognition Vol. 26; no. 6; pp. 1945 - 1958
• Main Authors: Zeller, Karl, Ballesta, Sébastien, Meunier, Hélène, Duboscq, Julie, Morino, Luca, Rimele, Adam, Bonnet, Xavier, Maille, Audrey, Dezecache, Guillaume, Garcia, Cécile
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.11.2023; Springer Nature B.V; Springer Verlag (Germany)
• Subjects: Animals; Attention; Behavioral Sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Cognitive science; Ecology, environment; Humans; Life Sciences; Macaca mulatta; Macaca tonkeana; Original Paper; Pictures; Predators; Primates; Psychology Research; Reaction Time; Snakes; Symbiosis; Visual discrimination; Visual perception; Zoology; Primates; Snake detection theory; Discrimination; Categorization; Predator detection; Oddity task

Detecting and identifying predators quickly is key to survival. According to the Snake Detection Theory (SDT), snakes have been a substantive threat to primates for millions of years, so that dedicated visual skills were tuned to detect snakes in early primates. Past experiments confronted the SDT b...