Abstract

One important research topic in social neuroscience and human–animal interaction (HAI) is to understand how facial identification contributes to interspecies understanding. The perception of a face not only provides visual information about an individual’s gender, age, and familiarity but also can communicate significant cues to affective state (e.g., happy), intention (e.g., gaze direction), cognitive activity (e.g., concentration), and temperament (e.g., hostility). The ability to recognize these cues and to respond promptly and appropriately guides effective human social interactions (Bruce & Young, 2012). In this chapter, I mainly use experimental evidence from behavioral and eye-tracking studies to compare the capability of sampling and processing several facial cues (i.e., facial identity, facial expression, and eye gaze) across humans, nonhuman primates, and domestic dogs.