Chimp & See Talk

Article about visual identification of wildlife

  • jwidness by jwidness moderator

    I read this very interesting article about learning to visually identify individual Andean bears: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.2981/wlb.00023

    I thought some things were brought up that are especially relevant to the chimp ID work that we're doing: even people with bear experience and wildlife ID experience were not initially very accurate at matching bears (better than chance, but only correct less than 2/3 of the time), time spent practicing improved their ability, and the rate of falsely saying the same bear was two different bears was higher than the rate of falsely saying two different bears were the same bear. Also, (and I think this is a message especially for me 😉) how confident people were that their response was correct did not correlate with whether their response was actually correct.

    Anyway, lots of cool information, and some cute bear pictures 😃

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  • maureenmccarthy by maureenmccarthy scientist, moderator

    Very interesting and relevant study, @jwidness! Good to know some of the factors that can lead to accurate identification (or the opposite). Thanks for sharing!

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  • MimiA by MimiA scientist, moderator

    this is awesome! thanks!

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  • jwidness by jwidness moderator

    I saw this paper that just came out and it also made me think about the matching process: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1814/20151292.full

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  • NuriaM by NuriaM scientist, moderator

    wow, very interesting!! thanks @jwidness 😃

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  • Snorticus by Snorticus

    Don't you think there are more complex structural aspects to chimp faces which offer wider opportunities for individuation in chimp faces than in bear faces? I may be somewhat biased toward chimp faces, so practice, practice, practice according to the 2nd study then? 😉

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  • jwidness by jwidness moderator

    I don't really know all that much about Andean bears -- certainly they all have different facial markings, and I'm sure they also get scars and injuries just like chimps. My experience IDing individual animals (capuchins, cotton tops, elephants, giraffes, etc) is that once you're familiar with the species, the individuals start to look quite different. Granted, when they have markings like giraffes, painted dogs, leopards, etc, the process is much easier. ; )

    I wonder if the similarity between chimp faces and human faces makes individual chimp faces seem more different from each other? It's clearly the case that humans privilege face processing and I would guess that chimp faces trigger some of the human face processing pathways. I wonder if, with experience, other species would also trigger the same face processing pathways?

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