Chimpanzees Extract Social Information from Agonistic Screams

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) agonistic screams are graded vocal signals that are produced in a context-specific manner. Screams given by aggressors and victims can be discriminated based on their acoustic structure but the mechanisms of listener comprehension of these calls are currently unknown. In...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPloS one Vol. 5; no. 7; p. e11473
Main Authors Slocombe, Katie E., Kaller, Tanja, Call, Josep, Zuberbühler, Klaus
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 14.07.2010
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Aggression - physiology
Animal behavior
Animal cognition
Animals
Behavior, Animal - physiology
Chimpanzees
Ecology/Behavioral Ecology
Evolutionary Biology/Animal Behavior
Evolutionary Biology/Human Evolution
Experiments
Favonigobius
Female
Information processing
Male
Monkeys & apes
Pan troglodytes
Pan troglodytes - physiology
Papio
Playback
Semantics
Social aspects
Social behavior
Social factors
Social interactions
Studies
Trends
Vocalization, Animal - physiology
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Summary:Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) agonistic screams are graded vocal signals that are produced in a context-specific manner. Screams given by aggressors and victims can be discriminated based on their acoustic structure but the mechanisms of listener comprehension of these calls are currently unknown. In this study, we show that chimpanzees extract social information from these vocal signals that, combined with their more general social knowledge, enables them to understand the nature of out-of-sight social interactions. In playback experiments, we broadcast congruent and incongruent sequences of agonistic calls and monitored the response of bystanders. Congruent sequences were in accordance with existing social dominance relations; incongruent ones violated them. Subjects looked significantly longer at incongruent sequences, despite them being acoustically less salient (fewer call types from fewer individuals) than congruent ones. We concluded that chimpanzees categorised an apparently simple acoustic signal into victim and aggressor screams and used pragmatics to form inferences about third-party interactions they could not see.
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Conceived and designed the experiments: KS JC KZ. Performed the experiments: KS TK. Analyzed the data: KS TK. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: JC. Wrote the paper: KS KZ.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0011473