Tackling Hominin Tickling: Bonobos Share the Social Features and Developmental Dynamics of Play Tickling With Humans.

It is under debate whether intersubjectivity-the capacity to experience a sense of togetherness around an action-is unique to humans. In humans, heavy tickling-a repeated body probing play that causes an automatic response including uncontrollable laughter (gargalesis)-has been linked to the emergence of intersubjectivity as it is aimed at making others laugh (self-generated responses are inhibited), it is often asymmetrical (older to younger subjects), and it elicits agent-dependent responses (pleasant/unpleasant depending on social bond). Intraspecific tickling and the related gargalesis response have been reported in humans, chimpanzees, and anecdotally in other great apes, potentially setting the line between hominids and other anthropoids.

Unsupervised clustering analysis-based characterization of spatial profiles of inaccuracy in apparent diffusion coefficient values with varying acquisition plan orientation and diffusion weighting gradient direction - a large multicenter phantom study.

This large multicenter study of 37 magnetic resonance imaging scanners aimed at characterizing, for the first time, spatial profiles of inaccuracy (namely, Δ-profiles) in apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values with varying acquisition plan orientation and diffusion weighting gradient direction, using a statistical approach exploiting unsupervised clustering analysis. A diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) protocol (b-value: 0-200-400-600-800-1000 s mm) with different combinations of acquisition plan orientation (axial/sagittal/coronal) and diffusion weighting gradient direction (anterior-posterior/left-right/feet-head) was acquired on a standard water phantom. For each acquisition setup, Δ-profiles along the 3 main orthogonal directions were characterized by fitting data with a second order polynomial function ().

Infant cries convey both stable and dynamic information about age and identity.

What information is encoded in the cries of human babies? While it is widely recognized that cries can encode distress levels, whether cries reliably encode the cause of crying remains disputed. Here, we collected 39201 cries from 24 babies recorded in their homes longitudinally, from 15 days to 3.5 months of age, a database we share publicly for reuse.

Crocodile perception of distress in hominid baby cries.

It is generally argued that distress vocalizations, a common modality for alerting conspecifics across a wide range of terrestrial vertebrates, share acoustic features that allow heterospecific communication. Yet studies suggest that the acoustic traits used to decode distress may vary between species, leading to decoding errors. Here we found through playback experiments that Nile crocodiles are attracted to infant hominid cries (bonobo, chimpanzee and human), and that the intensity of crocodile response depends critically on a set of specific acoustic features (mainly deterministic chaos, harmonicity and spectral prominences).

Improving the workflow to crack Small, Unbalanced, Noisy, but Genuine (SUNG) datasets in bioacoustics: The case of bonobo calls.

Despite the accumulation of data and studies, deciphering animal vocal communication remains challenging. In most cases, researchers must deal with the sparse recordings composing Small, Unbalanced, Noisy, but Genuine (SUNG) datasets. SUNG datasets are characterized by a limited number of recordings, most often noisy, and unbalanced in number between the individuals or categories of vocalizations.