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- Title
Grey wolves (Canis lupus) discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar human voices.
- Authors
Gammino, Beatrice; Palacios, Vicente; Root-Gutteridge, Holly; Reby, David; Gamba, Marco
- Abstract
The ability to discriminate between different individuals based on identity cues, which is important to support the social behaviour of many animal species, has mostly been investigated in conspecific contexts. A rare example of individual heterospecific discrimination is found in domestic dogs, who are capable of recognising their owners' voices. Here, we test whether grey wolves, the nearest wild relative of dogs, also have the ability to distinguish familiar human voices, which would indicate that dogs' ability is not a consequence of domestication. Using the habituation–dishabituation paradigm, we presented captive wolves with playback recordings of their keepers' and strangers' voices producing either familiar or unfamiliar phrases. The duration of their response was significantly longer when presented with keepers' voices than with strangers' voices, demonstrating that wolves discriminated between familiar and unfamiliar speakers. This suggests that dogs' ability to discriminate between human voices was probably present in their common ancestor and may support the idea that this is a general ability of vertebrates to recognise heterospecific individuals. Our study also provides further evidence for familiar voice discrimination in a wild animal in captivity, indicating that this ability may be widespread across vertebrate species.
- Subjects
HUMAN voice; ANIMAL social behavior; WOLVES; CAPTIVE wild animals; DOGS; ANIMAL species; HUMAN-animal communication
- Publication
Animal Cognition, 2023, Vol 26, Issue 5, p1589
- ISSN
1435-9448
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s10071-023-01796-9