Hi. Yes, that's caused by the ambient occlusion. The reason they still appear with shadows turned off is because the occlusion itself is not controlled by shadows, but raytracing. The solution here is to increase the min bias for the occlusion node you used on the material. It may only need to be increased a little, or a lot... you'll have to experiment with that. Increasing the bias to just the right amount should make this go away. Also, use "smooth polygons" in your render settings, which will also help this a bit by smoothing out some of the harsh angles that may be present in the mesh.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.