Abstract
Distress cries are emitted by many mammal species to elicit caregiving attention. Across taxa, these calls tend to share similar acoustic structures, but not necessarily frequency range, raising the question of their interspecific communicative potential. As domestic dogs are highly responsive to human emotional cues and experience stress when hearing human cries, we explore whether their responses to distress cries from human infants and puppies depend upon sharing conspecific frequency range or species-specific call characteristics. We recorded adult dogs’ responses to distress cries from puppies and human babies, emitted from a loudspeaker in a basket. The frequency of the cries was presented in both their natural range and also shifted to match the other species. Crucially, regardless of species origin, calls falling into the dog call-frequency range elicited more attention. Thus, domestic dogs’ responses depended strongly on the frequency range. Females responded both faster and more strongly than males, potentially reflecting asymmetries in parental care investment. Our results suggest that, despite domestication leading to an increased overall responsiveness to human cues, dogs still respond considerably less to calls in the natural human infant range than puppy range. Dogs appear to use a fast but inaccurate decision-making process to determine their response to distress-like vocalisations.
Highlights
In many mammals, distress cries are often produced by isolated, discomforted, endangered, or hurt infants and have the vital function of eliciting caregiving behaviour from the listener, often the parents[1,2,3,4]
When we tested the effects of Caller species, Call frequency, their interaction, and dog listener Sex on response strength scores with dog listener identity included as a random effect in a Linear Mixed Model (LMM, Table 1), we found that Caller species did not affect the Response score either by itself or in interaction with Call frequency, while dog Sex and Call frequency both did (p < 0.05, Table 1, Fig. 2)
We found that dogs paid more attention to the playback when the distress cry shared the 950 Hz frequency range with puppies, regardless of whether it was a human baby or a puppy crying, while the reason for the cry, whether pain of vaccination or discomfort from being bathed, had no effect
Summary
Distress cries are often produced by isolated, discomforted, endangered, or hurt infants and have the vital function of eliciting caregiving behaviour from the listener, often the parents[1,2,3,4]. Bremond[17] determined that some of these call features would act as “rejection markers”, which the listener uses to refuse to respond to signals, e.g. if the call’s frequency is too far outside of the species-specific range, it may be ignored. These rejection markers are critical to the listeners’ response, and can be separated from the irrelevant features such as call duration, but do not have to be species-specific[6,17]. Hetero-specific distress cries which share the range of the fundamental frequency or pitch of c ries[3,24] This suggests that calls are sufficiently close acoustically to be accepted as functionally equivalent and elicit the same behaviour[3,24]. While dogs are often said to respond empathetically to distress in adult humans[38,40,41,42], it is not known whether domestication has affected their responses to human infants
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