Abstract
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.
Highlights
For many species, the ability to recognize individuals by distinctive cues or signals is essential to the organization of social behavior (Seyfarth & Cheney, 2015; Steiger & Müller, 2008; Tibbetts & Dale, 2007; Yorzinski, 2017)
Our results suggest that human screams permit a level of individual discrimination, such that listeners could determine whether two screams were produced by the same vocalizer or by two different vocalizers
Our results demonstrate a prerequisite to this kind of vocal recognition, in that human screams are sufficiently distinct between vocalizers to permit immediate discrimination, but further research is needed to determine whether listeners could identify a scream as belonging to a particular individual
Summary
The ability to recognize individuals by distinctive cues or signals is essential to the organization of social behavior (Seyfarth & Cheney, 2015; Steiger & Müller, 2008; Tibbetts & Dale, 2007; Yorzinski, 2017). Less is known about the extent to which humans perceive and respond to identity cues in natural, nonlinguistic vocalizations such as laughter and screams In many ways, these vocalizations seem less similar to speech than they are to the calls of nonhuman species, in terms of their acoustic structures (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014; Davila-Ross, Owren & Zimmermann, 2010; Lingle et al, 2012; McCune et al, 1996), the neural mechanisms associated with them (Belin, 2006; Owren, Amoss & Rendall, 2011), and perhaps in some of their social communicative functions as well (McCune et al, 1996; Owren, Amoss & Rendall, 2011). Research in this understudied area is significant with respect to understanding the functions and evolution of the human vocal repertoire
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