It has been demonstrated that monkeys process conspecific faces holistically—unlike human or marmoset monkey faces (Dahl et al., Proc.R.Soc.B, accepted). Face inversion or blurring systematically affected the proportion of fixation and viewing time. Here, we describe the scanning characteristics on monkey and human faces using a nonreinforced paradigm. Upright and blurred monkey faces elicited initial fixations and refixations of eyes, before transferring to lower facial parts. For human faces, an initial fixation in the upper face regions was followed by an unspecific saccade to other regions. Inversion elicited an initial fixation on the upper quadrants of monkey faces, followed by fixations across the whole face. Inverted human faces, however, differed relatively little from upright human faces. Depending on the presentation condition of a face, the same face can trigger a different scanning behavior, which in turn is specific to the species affiliation, indicating a high-level influence.