Early development of turn-taking with parents shapes vocal acoustics in infant marmoset monkeys

Abstract

In humans, vocal turn-taking is a ubiquitous form of social interaction. It is a communication system that exhibits the properties of a dynamical system: two individuals become coupled to each other via acoustic exchanges and mutually affect each other. Human turn-taking develops during the first year of life. We investigated the development of vocal turn-taking in infant marmoset monkeys, a New World species whose adult vocal behaviour exhibits the same universal features of human turn-taking. We find that marmoset infants undergo the same trajectory of change for vocal turn-taking as humans, and do so during the same life-history stage. Our data show that turn-taking by marmoset infants depends on the development of self-monitoring, and that contingent parental calls elicit more mature-sounding calls from infants. As in humans, there was no evidence that parental feedback affects the rate of turn-taking maturation. We conclude that vocal turn-taking by marmoset monkeys and humans is an instance of convergent evolution, possibly as a result of pressures on both species to adopt a cooperative breeding strategy and increase volubility.

Arousal dynamics drive vocal production in marmoset monkeys

“…After about a month, they slow the rate of call production and produce phee calls almost exclusively. The speed with which this transition from immature to mature phee calls takes place is influenced by contingent vocal feedback provided by parents (Takahashi et al , 2016.…”

The autonomic nervous system is the engine for vocal development through social feedback

“…The indirect evidence for this process consists of the following: First, after a contingent vocal response from a parent, marmoset infants immediate produce more mature-sounding vocalizations [35**]. For example, the ANS-dependent spectral entropy of their vocalizations was lower in the 5-second interval following a contingent parental vocal response than in the 5 seconds preceding it.…”

“…In humans, contingent caregiver vocal responses to infant vocalizations also immediately result in more mature, speech-like vocalizations from those infants [8**]. Second, marmoset parents are more likely to give contingent responses to infant vocalizations that sound more mature (i.e., have lower entropy) [35**]. This, too, is like human infant-caregiver interactions [9].…”

Attending to and neglecting people: bridging neuroscience, psychology and sociology

“…It therefore cannot be considered to be determined (only) by cultural norms and conventions as suggested in conventional conversation analysis [6]. In this volume, Takahashi et al [17] show that marmoset monkeys display vocal turn-taking which develops in infancy at the same rate as the skills of self-monitoring. Apparently, marmoset vocal turn-taking reflects convergent evolution as the species is evolutionarily far from humans.…”

“…A central question is the role of social interaction in cognition: does the brain have a specialized machinery for processing sensory cues from conspecifics (the classical view); or could the interaction with others constitute even the 'default mode' of human brain function that enables human social interaction (see the debate in [5]). In this special issue, research on person perception in healthy humans [8] is complemented by studies of autistic individuals [9,10] and patients with brain lesions [11], development of social brain functions in young infants [12], social learning strategies (SLSs) [13], synchrony between individuals in musical ensembles [14], analysis of different aspects of on-going musical therapy [15], human -robot interaction [16], and vocal turn-taking in marmoset monkeys [17]. Other articles discuss alignment of people beyond mirroring [7], new data-analysis techniques for quantifying neural and behavioural data related to social cognition [4], and the contributions of interactional sociology to human cognitive and social neuroscience, and vice versa [6].…”