Meeting Abstract
Facial morphology and facial patterning often communicate important sources of information such as the age, sex, species identity, and individual identity of animals within ecological communities. Distinctiveness is often selected for under such contexts. This is particularly true in multispecies assemblages of phylogenetically related species, where there is strong selection to avoid heterospecific mating. Such character displacement of facial patterning has been observed in a variety of animal systems, yet we know little about whether similar selective pressures might shape the patterns of face ornamentation used in human art and culture. Chinese opera is an integrative performance artform that uses multimodal communication strategies to tell classic Chinese stories and myths. In these operas, male Jìng characters don elaborate, symbolic masks. The Jìng masks function within Chinese opera in ways similar to facial patterning in complex animal communities: they must correctly communicate the identity of specific Jìng characters to assist in rapid identification by the audience. We thus predicted that the facial ornamentation of Jìng characters has evolved under disruptive selection within each opera story (the cultural equivalent of a sympatric species assemblage) to reinforce character identity during audience recognition. Using a computer vision approach, we evaluated whether facial patterning has evolved for increased recognizability and disparity using a sample of Jìng masks from well-known traditional Chinese operas. We discuss our results in the context of similar patterns in non-human systems, such as the evolutionary divergence in facial patterning in guenon primates and Habronattus jumping spiders.
