Chimpanzees yawn when observing an android yawn
37 comments
·June 17, 2025nomilk
willis936
Not an answer but an expansion on the question: yawns are contagious among mammals. If you watch your cat yawn you're more likely to yawn and vice versa.
safeimp
Not only mammals (hence, this post).
Read about it, mammals will yawn when other non-mammals yawn.
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lupusreal
Well, the android is roughly mimicking a mammal. But more to that point, I've seen snakes yawn, and I then yawned. Reptiles generally seem to yawn and I'd bet they yawn when they see mammals yawn too.
blackoil
I remember yawn as a result of lack of oxygen and need for a deep breath. Maybe it was some reaction among animals where they breath even if not feeling lack of oxygen.
david422
Mythbusters did an episode on this https://www.discovery.com/shows/mythbusters/episodes/is-yawn...
IIRC, it wasn't that contagious.
e40
I always heard it was synchronization of sleep cycles.
dboreham
Guess: one of the emergent properties of LLM-like systems is mimicry.
4gotunameagain
Many different proposed causes listed in the wikipedia article.
smokel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yawn
Not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, but in a referenced article [2]: "Another puzzling phenomenon is that some male animals, men included, yawn in association with penile erection"
JadeNB
Also a brief survey in the linked Scientific Reports article.
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meindnoch
And what if they observe an iOS yawn?
theginger
They get locked into a caged ecosystem
divan
They become liquid and transparent
sva_
Those images of that android in the PDF is the stuff that nightmares are made off
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tarbyqualia
I thought it looked unnervingly realistic. That is, if you ignore the weird mouth curvature.
Jorge1o1
Monkey see, monkey do?
seanalltogether
And like a damn chimp I just yawned after reading this headline.
thih9
Science is notoriously late to discover what pet owners have known for centuries.
airstrike
Sounds like we need to test if people yawn after imagining someone else yawning
kgwgk
Of course we do. What I wonder is if there is any (inverse) correlation with aphantasia.
thevinchi
I came here to say the same damn thing.
Findecanor
Me too. I was already sleepy, so on the verge of yawning already though. Coincidence or did the headline trigger it?
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curtisszmania
[dead]
JadeNB
I'm not sure why 'Android' got auto-capitalized, but it's about a robot simulating yawning, not a phone.
tomhow
I've fixed it. Our auto-capitalizing bot didn't know the word could also be an improper noun.
culebron21
[flagged]
gwerbret
The journal is not Nature, it's Scientific Reports. This is a journal by the same publisher as Nature (which is why it's on the same domain) that will publish anything deemed "scientifically sound" by the reviewers, regardless of the (lack of) novelty and significance. It is very much not Nature.
null
Why are yawns contagious in the first place? (i.e. human to human)