Effect of pitch range on dogs' response to conspecific vs. heterospecific distress cries.

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

SUBMITTER: Root-Gutteridge H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8492669 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature