Do human screams permit individual recognition?

PeerJ

article

Jonathan W. M. Engelberg¹  Jay W. Schwartz¹  Harold Gouzoules¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, Emory University

关键词: Scream;    Individual recognition;    Identity perception;    Nonlinguistic vocalization;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.7087

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

The recognition of individuals through vocalizations is a highly adaptive ability in the social behavior of many species, including humans. However, the extent to which nonlinguistic vocalizations such as screams permit individual recognition in humans remains unclear. Using a same-different vocalizer discrimination task, we investigated participants’ ability to correctly identify whether pairs of screams were produced by the same person or two different people, a critical prerequisite to individual recognition. Despite prior theory-based contentions that screams are not acoustically well-suited to conveying identity cues, listeners discriminated individuals at above-chance levels by their screams, including both acoustically modified and unmodified exemplars. We found that vocalizer gender explained some variation in participants’ discrimination abilities and response times, but participant attributes (gender, experience, empathy) did not. Our findings are consistent with abundant evidence from nonhuman primates, suggesting that both human and nonhuman screams convey cues to caller identity, thus supporting the thesis of evolutionary continuity in at least some aspects of scream function across primate species.

【 授权许可】

CC BY