Identification of visual paternity cues in humans

Abstract

Understanding how individuals identify their relatives has implications for the evolution of social behaviour. Kinship cues might be based on familiarity, but in the face of paternity uncertainty and costly paternal investment, other mechanisms such as phenotypic matching may have evolved. In humans, paternal recognition of offspring and subsequent discriminative paternal investment have been linked to father-offspring facial phenotypic similarities. However, the extent to which paternity detection is impaired by environmentally induced facial information is unclear. We used 27 portraits of fathers and their adult sons to quantify the level of paternity detection according to experimental treatments that manipulate the location, type and quantity of visible facial information. We found that (i) the lower part of the face, that changes most with development, does not contain paternity cues, (ii) paternity can be detected even if relational information within the face is disrupted and (iii) the signal depends on the presence of specific information rather than their number. Taken together, the results support the view that environmental effects have little influence on the detection of paternity using facial similarities. This suggests that the cognitive dispositions enabling the facial detection of kinship relationships ignore genetic irrelevant facial information.

As Implicações Do Processo De Paternidade Para O Comportamento Masculino

“…18 A relação entre o parceiro e a parceira vem demonstrando forte influência no cuidado à saúde da mulher, refletindo positivamente na gestação, com bem estar e segurança, que se estende do início da gravidez até o puer-pério, estabelecendo laços entre o progenitor e a prole, de forma que essa aproximação possa desencadear futura-mente, uma relação afetiva positiva e compreensiva, desde que ocorra o engajamento e a igualdade entre a mãe e o pai, nos cuidados com o recém-nascido. 14,19…”

Perspectives: Hamilton's Legacy: Mechanisms of Kin Recognition in Humans

“…Which facial cues provide information about genetic relatedness? Although the eye region is more important than the mouth region, the upper half of the face provides even more information than the eyes alone ; see also Alvergne et al 2014;Ghahramani et al 2014). The lower face changes across development, especially in males, and thus provides fewer stable cues to genetic relatedness (e.g., Alvergne et al 2014).…”

“…Although the eye region is more important than the mouth region, the upper half of the face provides even more information than the eyes alone (Dal Martello & Maloney ; see also Alvergne et al. ; Ghahramani et al. ).…”

“…The lower face changes across development, especially in males, and thus provides fewer stable cues to genetic relatedness (e.g., Dal Martello & Maloney ; Alvergne et al. ).…”

Contribution of shape and surface reflectance information to kinship detection in 3D face images

“…The standard of the stimuli used in these studies varies considerably, with some image sets being sent in by families (using, e.g., photographs from family holidays), while other image sets were collected by researchers under more controlled conditions. Some of this research has found that different facial areas are important when making kinship judgments (Alvergne et al, 2014;. For instance, Dal Martello and found that the upper half of the face contains more informative cues of kinship than the lower half of the face, but that these cues are optimally combined when assessing a full face, and that featural information (e.g.…”