They can even detect changes in tone-which is the real reason your dog looks so guilty after toppling the garbage can. Research has shown that dogs and cats can distinguish between their owner’s voice and the voices of others. If a monkey hears and recognizes the distress calls of a known individual, they know something is wrong and can try to hide or escape danger.īut whether undomesticated animals can recognize individual humans is a bit murkier. “In the wild, we know that some monkeys also form specific associations with individuals of other species.” That’s wired into animals,” said Salmi, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology. “Babies are able, for example, to recognize the voices of their mothers and their scent. But some can also do that with other species. “If they are actually able to distinguish between people, there is hope.” Animals can recognize voicesĪ wide variety of animals appear to be able to recognize and differentiate between voices of their same species. “I worked mostly with wild gorillas, and one downside of working with wild primates is that through the habituation process we could make them much more susceptible to hunters because they become used to seeing and hearing people,” said Roberta Salmi, lead author of the study and director of the Primate Behavioral Ecology Lab in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Although this project focused specifically on gorillas at Zoo Atlanta, the findings, published in the journal Animal Cognition, have wider implications for the captive animals’ wild cousins.
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