Role
Yuri Kawaguchi is a Newton International Fellow (British Academy), working with Prof. Bridget Waller. Her current project is ‘Evolutionary Function of Infantile Features in Faces: How does " babyness" differ within and between species'.
Career overview
I got PhD from Kyoto University (Japan). My project was about recognition of infant faces in great apes. From 2021 to 2023, I worked with Overseas Research Fellowships by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna (Austria), and studied dogs’ recognition.
Research areas
I am interested in the evolutionary function of infant faces. Infant face (or known as baby schema) plays an important role in mother-infant relationship or other social interactions in humans. However, whether this has an evolutionary origin has not been tested before. I am studying the function of infantile facial features across primates to understand the selection pressures that lead to its evolution.
Sponsors and collaborators
British academy
Publications
Kawaguchi, Y., Nakamura, K. , Tajima, T., Waller, M. B. (2023) Revisiting the baby schema by a geometric morphometric analysis of infant facial characteristics across great apes. Scientific Reports, 13, 5129 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31731-4
Tomonaga, M., Kurosawa, Y., Kawaguchi, Y.、Takiyama, H. (2023) Don't look back on failure: spontaneous uncertainty monitoring in chimpanzees. Learning & Behaviour https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-023-00581-5
Brooks, J., Kano, F., Kawaguchi, Y. & Yamamoto, S. (2022) Oxytocin promotes species-relevant outgroup attention in bonobos and chimpanzees. Hormones and Behavior, 143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2022.105182
Kano, F., Kawaguchi, Y., & Hanling, Y. (2022). Experimental evidence that uniformly white sclera enhances the visibility of eye-gaze direction in humans and chimpanzees. ELife, 11, e74086. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74086
Kawaguchi, Y., Nakamura, K., Tomonaga, M. & Adachi, I. (2021). Impairment Effect of Infantile Colouration on Face Discrimination in Chimpanzees. Royal Society Open Science. 8, 211421. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211421
Kawaguchi, Y., Tomonaga, M. & Adachi, I. (2021). No evidence of spatial representation of age, but “own-age bias” like face processing found in chimpanzees. Animal Cognition, 25, 415–424. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01564-7
Kawaguchi, Y., Nakamura, K. & Tomonaga, M. (2020). Colour matters more than shape for chimpanzees’ recognition of developmental face changes. Scientific Reports, 10, 18201. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75284-2
Kawaguchi, Y., Kano, F., & Tomonaga, M. (2019). Chimpanzees, but not bonobos, attend more to infant than adult conspecifics. Animal Behaviour, 154, 171–181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2019.06.014
Kawaguchi, Y., Kuroshima, H., & Fujita, K. (2019). Age categorization of conspecific and heterospecific faces in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 133(4), 502–511. https://doi.org/10.1037/com0000185