ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
Crocodile perception of distress in hominid baby cries.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 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
10 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dogs' reactions to motivations and emotions in conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Vocal characteristics of distress and reproductive vocalizations in North American wapiti.Current zoology · 2025Article
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- 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
- Rough is salient: a conserved vocal niche to hijack the brain's salience system.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Nonlinear phenomena in pinnipeds: a preliminary investigation in the contact calls of northern elephant seal pups.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Machine learning algorithms can predict emotional valence across ungulate vocalizations.iScience · 2025Article
- The neurobiology of parenting and infant-evoked aggression.Physiological reviews · 2025Review
- 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
- Crocodile perception of distress in hominid baby cries.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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). Our results suggest that crocodiles are sensitive to the degree of distress encoded in the vocalizations of phylogenetically very distant vertebrates. A comparison of these results with those obtained with human subjects confronted with the same stimuli further indicates that crocodiles and humans use different acoustic criteria to assess the distress encoded in infant cries. Interestingly, the acoustic features driving crocodile reaction are likely to be more reliable markers of distress than those used by humans. These results highlight that the acoustic features encoding information in vertebrate sound signals are not necessarily identical across species.
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.