Across vertebrate taxa, infant distress cries tend to share acoustic features such as a high pitch, high intensity and the presence of nonlinear phenomena 5, while the structure is commonly a simple slope 6, suggesting that cry production may be constrained by the weak motor control infants have over their vocal folds. Cries signal that potential or actual harm is occurring, and as the causes of the cry can be both dangerous (e.g., a predator is present) and time critical (e.g., a predator attack may be imminent), demands quick but potentially costly reactions from helpers 5. In many mammals, distress cries are often produced by isolated, discomforted, endangered, or hurt infants and have the vital function of eliciting caregiving behaviour from the listener, often the parents 1, 2, 3, 4. Dogs appear to use a fast but inaccurate decision-making process to determine their response to distress-like vocalisations. Our results suggest that, despite domestication leading to an increased overall responsiveness to human cues, dogs still respond considerably less to calls in the natural human infant range than puppy range. Females responded both faster and more strongly than males, potentially reflecting asymmetries in parental care investment.
Thus, domestic dogs’ responses depended strongly on the frequency range. Crucially, regardless of species origin, calls falling into the dog call-frequency range elicited more attention. The frequency of the cries was presented in both their natural range and also shifted to match the other species. We recorded adult dogs’ responses to distress cries from puppies and human babies, emitted from a loudspeaker in a basket. As domestic dogs are highly responsive to human emotional cues and experience stress when hearing human cries, we explore whether their responses to distress cries from human infants and puppies depend upon sharing conspecific frequency range or species-specific call characteristics. Across taxa, these calls tend to share similar acoustic structures, but not necessarily frequency range, raising the question of their interspecific communicative potential. Distress cries are emitted by many mammal species to elicit caregiving attention.
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