Deer Mothers Are Sensitive to Infant Distress Vocalizations of Diverse Mammalian Species

Lingle, Susan; Riede, Tobias

doi:10.1086/677677

Cited by 74 publications

(85 citation statements)

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“…For example, deer (Odocoileus hemionus and Odocoileus virginianus) mothers will approach a speaker playing distress vocalizations of infant marmots (Marmota flaviventris), seals (Neophoca cinerea and Arctocephalus tropicalis), domestic cats (Felis catus), bats (Lasionycteris noctovagans), humans (Homo sapiens), and other mammals as though they were going to assist a fawn in distress. Does also emit contact calls when near that speaker, as they do when responding to their own fawns (16). Chimpanzees are the primate species closest to humans.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From the moment of birth, certain signals from babies effectively influence parenting: Infant cries motivate adults to approach and to act (7,8). That is, infant cries and caregiver responses to them constitute an integrated dyadic system that encompasses the infant production of cries as well as the adult anatomy (9-12), physiology (5, 13), and perception, processing, and response apparatus to cries (2,4,5,(14)(15)(16)(17). Cries put both infant and caregiver in states of strong mutual nervous system activation and increase the probability of behavioral attunement (18).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In observations of maternal behavior in situ in 11 countries, we hypothesized preferred and common patterns of new mothers' responses to their own infants' cries. In three independent companion fMRI experiments in three countries, we sought to identify neurobiological underpinnings of the same behavioral responses in new mothers in the United States to their own young infants' cries, in experienced mothers in China to infant cries in comparison with noninfant cry emotional sounds, and in experienced mothers and inexperienced nonmothers in Italy to generic infant cries.Care-soliciting vocalizations are common in the young of many species (2,6,16,20,21) and constitute a signal system that has been conserved throughout mammalian evolution (2,22). Human infants effectively elicit parental attention, proximity, and solicitude by crying (23-29); in times of famine, for example, crying…”

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confidence: 99%

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Neurobiology of culturally common maternal responses to infant cry

Bornstein

Putnick

Rigo

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

141

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This report coordinates assessments of five types of behavioral responses in new mothers to their own infants' cries with neurobiological responses in new mothers to their own infants' cries and in experienced mothers and inexperienced nonmothers to infant cries and other emotional and control sounds. We found that 684 new primipara mothers in 11 countries (Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, France, Kenya, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) preferentially responded to their infants' vocalizing distress by picking up and holding and by talking to their infants, as opposed to displaying affection, distracting, or nurturing. Complementary functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyses of brain responses to their own infants' cries in 43 new primipara US mothers revealed enhanced activity in concordant brain territories linked to the intention to move and to speak, to process auditory stimulation, and to caregive [supplementary motor area (SMA), inferior frontal regions, superior temporal regions, midbrain, and striatum]. Further, fMRI brain responses to infant cries in 50 Chinese and Italian mothers replicated, extended, and, through parcellation, refined the results. Brains of inexperienced nonmothers activated differently. Culturally common responses to own infant cry coupled with corresponding fMRI findings to own infant and to generic infant cries identified specific, common, and automatic caregiving reactions in mothers to infant vocal expressions of distress and point to their putative neurobiological bases. Candidate behaviors embedded in the nervous systems of human caregivers lie at the intersection of evolutionary biology and developmental cultural psychology.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Neurobiology of culturally common maternal responses to infant cry

Bornstein

Putnick

Rigo

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

141

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Based on behavioral studies, acute sensitivity to conspecific calls further seems to be a feature of other mammals including ungulates (e.g. deer, elk) (Lingle and Riede, 2014) and even aquatic mammals such as pinnipeds (e.g. walruses, seals) (Cunningham et al, 2014; Reichmuth and Casey, 2014).…”

Section: Bottom-up Perspectives Of Vision and Hearing Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory object perception: A neurobiological model and prospective review

Brefczynski-Lewis

Lewis

2017

Neuropsychologia

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Interaction with the world is a multisensory experience, but most of what is known about the neural correlates of perception comes from studying vision. Auditory inputs enter cortex with its own set of unique qualities, and leads to use in oral communication, speech, music, and the understanding of emotional and intentional states of others, all of which are central to the human experience. To better understand how the auditory system develops, recovers after injury, and how it may have transitioned in its functions over the course of hominin evolution, advances are needed in models of how the human brain is organized to process real-world natural sounds and “auditory objects”. This review presents a simple fundamental neurobiological model of hearing perception at a category level that incorporates principles of bottom-up signal processing together with top-down constraints of grounded cognition theories of knowledge representation. Though mostly derived from human neuroimaging literature, this theoretical framework highlights rudimentary principles of real-world sound processing that may apply to most if not all mammalian species with hearing and acoustic communication abilities. The model encompasses three basic categories of sound-source: (1) action sounds (non-vocalizations) produced by ‘living things’, with human (conspecific) and non-human animal sources representing two subcategories; (2) action sounds produced by ‘non-living things’, including environmental sources and human-made machinery; and (3) vocalizations (‘living things’), with human versus non-human animals as two subcategories therein. The model is presented in the context of cognitive architectures relating to multisensory, sensory-motor, and spoken language organizations. The models’ predictive values are further discussed in the context of anthropological theories of oral communication evolution and the neurodevelopment of spoken language proto-networks in infants/toddlers. These phylogenetic and ontogenetic frameworks both entail cortical network maturations that are proposed to at least in part be organized around a number of universal acoustic-semantic signal attributes of natural sounds, which are addressed herein.

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“…Indeed, numerous studies have found several examples of adequate reactions to heterospecific alarm calls (e.g. ground squirrels [8]; mongooses [9]; sifaka and lemur [10]) or distress vocalizations [11]. Humans are also able to use these acoustic features to assess the inner state and decipher the contexts of non-human vocalizations (calls of macaques: [12]; pigs: [13,14]; dogs: [15]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dog growls express various contextual and affective content for human listeners

et al. 2017

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Vocal expressions of emotions follow simple rules to encode the inner state of the caller into acoustic parameters, not just within species, but also in cross-species communication. Humans use these structural rules to attribute emotions to dog vocalizations, especially to barks, which match with their contexts. In contrast, humans were found to be unable to differentiate between playful and threatening growls, probably because single growls' aggression level was assessed based on acoustic size cues. To resolve this contradiction, we played back natural growl bouts from three social contexts (food guarding, threatening and playing) to humans, who had to rate the emotional load and guess the context of the playbacks. Listeners attributed emotions to growls according to their social contexts. Within threatening and playful contexts, bouts with shorter, slower pulsing growls and showing smaller apparent body size were rated to be less aggressive and fearful, but more playful and happy. Participants associated the correct contexts with the growls above chance. Moreover, women and participants experienced with dogs scored higher in this task. Our results indicate that dogs may communicate honestly their size and inner state in a serious contest situation, while manipulatively in more uncertain defensive and playful contexts.

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Deer Mothers Are Sensitive to Infant Distress Vocalizations of Diverse Mammalian Species

Cited by 74 publications

References 61 publications

Neurobiology of culturally common maternal responses to infant cry

Neurobiology of culturally common maternal responses to infant cry

Auditory object perception: A neurobiological model and prospective review

Dog growls express various contextual and affective content for human listeners

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