Nonlinear vocal phenomena affect human perceptions of distress, size and dominance in puppy whines.
Proc Biol Sci
; 289(1973): 20220429, 2022 04 27.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35473375
ABSTRACT
While nonlinear phenomena (NLP) are widely reported in animal vocalizations, often causing perceptual harshness and roughness, their communicative function remains debated. Several hypotheses have been put forward attention-grabbing, communication of distress, exaggeration of body size and dominance. Here, we use state-of-the-art sound synthesis to investigate how NLP affect the perception of puppy whines by human listeners. Listeners assessed the distress, size or dominance conveyed by synthetic puppy whines with manipulated NLP, including frequency jumps and varying proportions of subharmonics, sidebands and deterministic chaos. We found that the presence of chaos increased the puppy's perceived level of distress and that this effect held across a range of representative fundamental frequency (fo) levels. Adding sidebands and subharmonics also increased perceived distress among listeners who have extensive caregiving experience with pre-weaned puppies (e.g. breeders, veterinarians). Finally, we found that whines with added chaos, subharmonics or sidebands were associated with larger and more dominant puppies, although these biases were attenuated in experienced caregivers. Together, our results show that nonlinear phenomena in puppy whines can convey rich information to human listeners and therefore may be crucial for offspring survival during breeding of a domesticated species.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Banco de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Voz
Límite:
Animals
/
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Proc Biol Sci
Asunto de la revista:
BIOLOGIA
Año:
2022
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Francia