Human cerebral response to animal affective vocalizations

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Comparative Psychology
• Bioacoustics

Background:

• The specificity of human emotional processing remains unclear, particularly whether it extends to non-human vocalizations.
• Understanding cross-species emotional communication is crucial for evolutionary and neurological insights.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate cerebral responses to affectively valenced animal vocalizations.
• To determine if neural mechanisms for processing human affective vocalizations are engaged by other species' sounds.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity.
• Participants were exposed to auditory stimuli of cat and rhesus monkey vocalizations with varying emotional valence.
• Brain responses were compared between different animal vocalizations and human non-speech affective sounds.

Main Results:

• Distinct cerebral responses were observed for positively versus negatively valenced animal vocalizations.
• These differential responses occurred despite participants' inability to consciously discern the valence of the animal sounds.
• A shared neural response pattern in the orbitofrontal cortex was identified for both human and animal affective vocalizations.

Conclusions:

• Neural mechanisms for processing human affective vocalizations can be recruited by heterospecific affective vocalizations.
• Emotional processing of vocalizations may involve shared, potentially unconscious, systems across species.
• Findings support the hypothesis of conserved emotional systems in mammals.