Humans (Homo sapiens) but not baboons (Papio papio) demonstrate crossmodal pitch-luminance correspondence

Abstract

Humans spontaneously and consistently map information coming from different sensory modalities. Surprisingly, the phylogenetic origin of such cross-modal correspondences has been under-investigated. A notable exception is the study of Ludwig et al (2011) which reports that both humans and chimpanzees spontaneously map high-pitched sounds to bright objects and low-pitched sounds to dark objects. Our pre-registered study aimed to directly replicate this research on both humans and baboons (Papio papio), an old world monkey which is more phylogenetically distant from humans than chimpanzees. Following Ludwig et al., participants were presented with a visual classification task where they had to sort black and white square (low and high luminance), while background sounds (low or high-pitched tones) were playing. Whereas we replicated the finding that humans’ performance on the visual task was affected by congruency between sound and luminance of the target, we did not find any of those effects on baboons’ performance. These results question the presence of a shared iconic pitch-luminance mapping in other non-human primates.