Do human screams permit individual recognition?

Abstract

The recognition of individuals through vocalizations is a highly adaptive ability in the social behavior of many species, including humans. However, the extent to which nonlinguistic vocalizations such as screams permit individual recognition in humans remains unclear. Using a same-different vocalizer discrimination task, we investigated participants ability to correctly identify whether pairs of screams were produced by the same person or two different people, a critical prerequisite to individual recognition. Despite prior theory-based contentions that screams are not acoustically well-suited to conveying identity cues, listeners discriminated individuals at above-chance levels by their screams, including both acoustically modified and unmodified exemplars. We found that vocalizer gender explained some variation in participants discrimination abilities and response times, but participant attributes (gender, experience, empathy) did not. Our findings are consistent with abundant evidence from nonhuman primates, suggesting that both human and nonhuman screams convey cues to caller identity, thus supporting the thesis of evolutionary continuity in at least some aspects of scream function across primate species.