ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Baby cry recognition is independent of motherhood but improved by experience and exposure.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Nonlinear acoustic phenomena affect the perception of pain in human baby cries.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Old but attuned: the ability to decode babies' cries does not decline with age.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Pain cues override identity cues in baby cries.iScience · 2024Article
- Age and parous-experience dependent changes in emotional contagion for positive infant sounds.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Adult auditory brain responses to nestling begging calls in seasonal songbirds: an fMRI study in non-parenting male and female starlings (Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Infant cries convey both stable and dynamic information about age and identity.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Early onset of postnatal individual vocal recognition in a highly colonial mammal species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Maternal responses to pup calls in a high-cost lactation species.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Postpartum Gray Matter Changes in the Auditory Cortex.Journal of clinical medicine · 2021Article
- The Lausanne Infant Crying Stress Paradigm: Validation of an Early Postpartum Stress Paradigm with Women at Low vs. High Risk of Childbirth-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.Journal of personalized medicine · 2021Article
- Baby cry recognition is independent of motherhood but improved by experience and exposure.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Neurobiological changes affecting new mothers are known to support the development of the mother-infant relationship (the 'maternal brain'). However, which aspects of parenting are actually mother-specific and which rely on general cognitive abilities remains debated. For example, refuting earlier findings, a recent study demonstrated that fathers identify their own baby from their cries just as well as mothers. Here we show that this performance is independent not only of sex, but also of parenthood status. We found that mothers' ability to recognize their newborn from their cries increased rapidly within few days postpartum, with highly multiparous mothers performing better. However, both male and female non-parents could similarly recognize an assigned baby, even after a very short exposure. As in mothers, both the initial amount of experimental exposure to the baby's cries (learning opportunity) and prior experience of caring for infants (auditory expertise) affected participants' performance. We thus suggest that, rather than being female-specific or motherhood-dependent, the ability to recognize a baby from their cries derives from general auditory and learning skills. By being available to non-parents of both sexes, it may contribute to the caregiving flexibility required for efficient cooperative breeding in humans.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.