Rough is salient: a conserved vocal niche to hijack the brain's salience system

The propensity to communicate extreme emotional states and arousal through salient, non-referential vocalizations is ubiquitous among mammals and beyond. Screams, whether intended to warn conspecifics or deter aggressors, require a rapid increase of air influx through vocal folds to induce nonlinear distortions of the signal. These distortions contain salient, temporally patterned acoustic features in a restricted range of the audible spectrum. These features may have a biological significance, triggering fast behavioural responses in the receivers. We present converging neurophysiological and behavioural evidence from humans and animals supporting that the properties emerging from nonlinear vocal phenomena are ideally adapted to induce efficient sensory, emotional and behavioural responses. We argue that these fast temporal-rough-modulations are unlikely to be an epiphenomenon of vocal production but rather the result of selective evolutionary pressure on vocal warning signals to promote efficient communication. In this view, rough features may have been selected and conserved as an acoustic trait to recruit ancestral sensory salience pathways and elicit optimal reactions in the receiver. By exploring the impact of rough vocalizations at the receiver's end, we review the perceptual, behavioural and neural factors that may have shaped these signals to evolve as powerful communication tools.This article is part of the theme issue 'Nonlinear phenomena in vertebrate vocalizations: mechanisms and communicative functions'.