Zoo housed meerkats do not recognise human emotions (Supporting data)

Supporting dataset for [citation when paper is published]. Abstract Domestic mammals can categorically process and respond functionally to human emotional cues. However, to date, it is unclear whether this ability is underlaid by shared mammal emotional processing, associative learning through exposure to humans, or has arisen through the domestication process. To disambiguate these hypotheses, we investigated whether zoo-housed meerkats (Suricata suricatta), who have not undergone the process of domestication but are regularly exposed to human contact, recognise human emotion, and whether this is modulated by human interaction levels. 35 meerkats’ were presented with happy, sad, fearful and neutral human emotional displays to assess their functional responses. A cross-modal paradigm also tested for expectancy violation responses to emotionally incongruent signal pairs. While isolated findings suggest human interaction level modulated some behavioural responses to the test paradigms, no patterns of functional responses, lateralised processing, or cross-modal integration consistent with those documented in domestic mammals emerged, either for the whole study population or for those meerkats with a history of close interaction with humans. Thus, zoo-housed meerkats do not show strong evidence of human emotion recognition. Our findings support the hypothesis that the capacity for human emotion recognition in domestic species has arisen through artificial selection for attention to human communicative cues. Variables included Human emotional signal presentation trial data Obs_ID: Unique identifier for each observation Experiment: Stimulus medium: audio only ("Audio"), video only ("Video") or audiovisual ("Cross_Modal") Zoo: Zoo identifier Meerkat: Meerkat identifier Actor: Actor identifier - numbering matches the identifiers in the RAVDESS database Session: Session number, within each stimulus medium block. Audio only and video only blocks comprised 3 sessions each, while the cross modal block comprised 6 sessions Trial: Trial number within the session, for each individual Emotion: Emotion being portrayed by the actor: takes values "happy", "angry", "fearful" and "neutral". For cross-modal stimuli, Emotion corresponds to the emotion portrayed in the *video* (with matching audio if Congruence = "Match", or non-matching audio if Congruence = "Mismatch") Congruence: For cross-modal stimuli, indicates whether audio and visual emotional stimuli match ("Match) or don't ("Mismatch"). Recorded as NA for audio only and video only blocks Valence: Valence of the emotional signal - Happy and Neutral emotions were considered to have Positive valence, while Angry and Fearful emotions were considered to have Negative valence Zoo-level data: HAI_Level: Human-animal interaction level, for each zoo. Zoos where meerkats did not take part in encounters were coded as 1, corresponding to lower levels of HAI, while zoos where meerkats took part in encounters were coded as 3, corresponding to higher levels of HAI. Individual vigilance data based on behavioural observations of spontaneous behaviour Vigilance_Perc: Percentage of time spent vigilant, averaged across observations for each individual Human_Vigilance_Perc: Percentage of time when vigilance was directed towards humans out of the total time being vigilant, averaged across observations for each individual Behavioural responses to human emotional signal presentation Tube: Time spent in the tube (seconds) Zone_3: Time spent in the zone of the test arena furthest from the laptop (zone 3) (seconds) Zone_2: Time spent in the middle zone of the test arena (zone 2) (seconds) Zone_1: Time spent in the zone of the test arena closest to the laptop (zone 1) (seconds) Binocular_Look: Time spent with both eyes visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen in the field of binocular vision Left_Gaze: Time spent with the left eye visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen in the left field of vision Right_Gaze: Time spent with the right eye visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen in the right field of vision No_Look: Time spent with no eyes visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen not in the field of vision In: Total time spent in the test arena (zone 1, 2 and 3) Lat_Index: Laterality index, defined as LI= (Time spent on left gaze-Time spent on right gaze)/(Total looking time (left+right+binocular)) Binocular_Look_Perc: Percentage of time in the test arena with both eyes visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen in the field of binocular vision Left_Gaze_Perc: Percentage of time spent in the test arena with the left eye visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen in the left field of vision Right_Gaze_Perc: Percentage of time spent in the test arena with the right eye visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen in the right field of vision No_Look_Perc: Percentage of time spent in the test arena with no eyes visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen not in the field of vision Look_Perc: Percentage of time in the test arena withat least one eye visible on the footage from the GoPro directly above the laptop screen, ie with the screen in the field of vision Z1_Pres: Presence or absence in the zone closest to the screen, coded as Yes or No