ArticleAnimal cognition2021
A machine learning approach to infant distress calls and maternal behaviour of wild chimpanzees.
Article in Animal cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- The growing methodological toolkit for identifying and studying social learning and culture in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Improving the workflow to crack Small, Unbalanced, Noisy, but Genuine (SUNG) datasets in bioacoustics: The case of bonobo calls.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- An Efficient Classification of Neonates Cry Using Extreme Gradient Boosting-Assisted Grouped-Support-Vector Network.Journal of healthcare engineering · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Distress calls are an acoustically variable group of vocalizations ubiquitous in mammals and other animals. Their presumed function is to recruit help, but there has been much debate on whether the nature of the disturbance can be inferred from the acoustics of distress calls. We used machine learning to analyse episodes of distress calls of wild infant chimpanzees. We extracted exemplars from those distress call episodes and examined them in relation to the external event triggering them and the distance to the mother. In further steps, we tested whether the acoustic variants were associated with particular maternal responses. Our results suggest that, although infant chimpanzee distress calls are highly graded, they can convey information about discrete problems experienced by the infant and about distance to the mother, which in turn may help guide maternal parenting decisions. The extent to which mothers rely on acoustic cues alone (versus integrate other contextual-visual information) to decide upon intervening should be the focus of future research.
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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.