Matching vocalizations to vocalizing faces in a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)

Auditory-visual processing of species-specific vocalizations was investigated in a female chimpanzee named Pan. The basic task was auditory-visual matching-to-sample, where Pan was required to choose the vocalizer from two test movies in response to a chimpanzee's vocalization. In experiment 1,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Animal cognition 2004-07, Vol.7 (3), p.179-184
Main Authors: Izumi, Akihiro, Kojima, Shozo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Animal Communication
Animals
Discrimination Learning
Facial Expression
Female
Individuality
Monkeys & apes
Pan troglodytes
Pan troglodytes - psychology
Photic Stimulation
Recognition (Psychology)
Vocalization, Animal
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Summary:Auditory-visual processing of species-specific vocalizations was investigated in a female chimpanzee named Pan. The basic task was auditory-visual matching-to-sample, where Pan was required to choose the vocalizer from two test movies in response to a chimpanzee's vocalization. In experiment 1, movies of vocalizing and silent faces were paired as the test movies. The results revealed that Pan recognized the status of other chimpanzees whether they vocalized or not. In experiment 2, two different types of vocalizing faces of an identical individual were prepared as the test movies. Pan recognized the correspondence between vocalization types and faces. These results suggested that chimpanzees possess crossmodal representations of their vocalizations, as do humans. Together with the ability of vocal individual recognition, this ability might reflect chimpanzees' profound understanding of the status of other individuals.
ISSN:1435-9448
1435-9456
DOI:10.1007/s10071-004-0212-4