The Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) is one of the most colonial mammal species in the world. Females exclusively nurse their pups for 9 to 11 months, during which they alternate frequent foraging trips at sea with suckling periods ashore. The survival of the pup thus depends on the ability of the mother-pup pair to relocate each other among thousands of individuals. Previous work has demonstrated identity information encoded in pup-attraction (PAC) and female-attraction (FAC) calls. Here, we investigated vocal recognition between mother and pup using playbacks of PAC and FAC performed during the breeding season at Pelican Point, Namibia. Both females and pups were able to specifically discriminate the voice of their pup or their mother from non-affiliated pup or mother. Females were able to memorize previous versions of their pup's calls (evidence of recognition up to 73 days after pup's calls recording). Vocal recognition was demonstrated in pups from 1- to 13-weeks old age. Females and pups did not respond differently to the non-filial or non-mother (for pups) stimulus even if it had a strong acoustic similarity with the filial or mother stimulus. This suggested that Cape fur seal mother-pup pairs have high perceptual and cognitive abilities, allowing individuals to identify kin's vocalizations in a very noisy and confusing environment.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01627-3 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Do goats recognise humans cross-modally?
PeerJ
January 2025
Department of Infectious Diseases and Public Health, Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Recognition plays a key role in the social lives of gregarious species, enabling animals to distinguish among social partners and tailor their behaviour accordingly. As domesticated animals regularly interact with humans, as well as members of their own species, we might expect mechanisms used to discriminate between conspecifics to also apply to humans. Given that goats can combine visual and vocal cues to recognise one another, we investigated whether this cross-modal recognition extends to discriminating among familiar humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe development of deep convolutional generative adversarial network to synthesize odontocetes' clicks.
J Acoust Soc Am
January 2025
Key Laboratory of Underwater Acoustic Communication and Marine Information Technology of the Ministry of Education, College of Ocean and Earth Sciences, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
Odontocetes are capable of dynamically changing their echolocation clicks to efficiently detect targets, and learning their clicking strategy can facilitate the design of man-made detecting signals. In this study, we developed deep convolutional generative adversarial networks guided by an acoustic feature vector (AF-DCGANs) to synthesize narrowband clicks of the finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides sunameri) and broadband clicks of the bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). The average short-time objective intelligibility (STOI), spectral correlation coefficient (Spe-CORR), waveform correlation coefficient (Wave-CORR), and dynamic time warping distance (DTW-Distance) of the synthetic clicks were 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTemporally dissociable neural representations of pitch height and chroma.
J Neurosci
January 2025
Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
The extraction and analysis of pitch underpin speech and music recognition, sound segregation, and other auditory tasks. Perceptually, pitch can be represented as a helix composed of two factors: height monotonically aligns with frequency, while chroma cyclically repeats at doubled frequencies. Although the early perceptual and neurophysiological mechanisms for extracting pitch from acoustic signals have been extensively investigated, the equally essential subsequent stages that bridge to high-level auditory cognition remain less well understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAre domestic chickens born with predator recognition? Validation of a sound playback experiment.
Behav Processes
January 2025
Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Ecology of Tropical Islands, Key Laboratory of Tropical Animal and Plant Ecology of Hainan Province, College of Life Sciences, Hainan Normal University, Haikou 571158, China. Electronic address:
Predation risk can influence behavioral decisions of animals in various ways. Prey animals have the opportunity to choose antipredation behaviors and escape strategies only by quickly and accurately identifying predators. As precocial birds, domestic chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) have no adaptation period after hatching and must immediately survive under predation risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImpact of partial occlusion of the face on multisensory emotion perception: Comparison of pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic.
PLoS One
January 2025
Department of Psychology, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Tokyo, Japan.
We perceive and understand others' emotional states from multisensory information such as facial expressions and vocal cues. However, such cues are not always available or clear. Can partial loss of visual cues affect multisensory emotion perception? In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the widespread use of face masks, which can reduce some facial cues used in emotion perception.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!