A persistent anthropocentric school of thought prevents comparative cognition from truly joining the evolutionary sciences, which often view “cognition” as an alien subject to the study of life. In this article, I argue that cognition is indeed inherent to all life and that we could study the evolution of cognitive skills like any other species-specific trait if we stop elevating convergence over

Across many species, a major function of vocal communication is to convey formidability, with low voice frequencies traditionally considered the main vehicle for projecting large size and aggression. Vocal loudness is often ignored, yet it might explain some puzzling exceptions to this frequency code. Here we demonstrate, through acoustic analyses of over 3,000 human vocalizations and four percept

Cat purring, the unusual, pulsed vibration that epitomizes comfort, enjoys a special status in the world of vocal communication research. Indeed, it has long been flagged as a rare exception to the dominant theory of voice production in mammals. A new study presents histological and biomechanical evidence that purring can occur passively, without needing muscle vibration in the larynx controlled b

Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) exhibit a suite of stone handling behaviours (SHB, e.g. rolling, pounding, etc.) that lack an obvious instrumental function. As SHBs appear to be socially transmitted, previous research has focused on evolutionary theories of tool use and cumulative culture. It has been assumed that SHBs in general represent a form of solitary play whose function is to hone and m

Cognitive control is a skill used to control one’s own behaviour to reach a goal. We compared this skill across archosaurs by using the distraction task on American alligators, emus, chickens, and common ravens. We investigated whether the animals would still find a food reward hidden behind one of two identical opaque barriers after picking up a food distraction. Results show that all species can

Mammalian vocalisations are extremely diverse, and evolutionary approaches to understanding this diversity assume that much of their acoustic form maps onto their function, with specific features serving universal roles. Here, we hypothesize that nonlinear phenomena (i.e., deterministic chaos, sidebands, subharmonics, and frequency jumps), which make the voice perceptually rough or harsh, contribu

The evolution of whole-body endothermy occurred independently in dinosaurs and mammals and was associated with some of the most significant neurocognitive shifts in life's history. These included a 20-fold increase in neurons and the evolution of new brain structures, supporting similar functions in both lineages. We propose the endothermic brain hypothesis, which holds that elaborations in endoth

Objective: Children's own ratings and opinions on their schools sound environments add important information on noise sources. They can also provide information on how to further improve and optimize children's learning situation in their classrooms. This study reports on the Swedish translation and application of an evidence-based questionnaire that measures how children perceive the acoustic env

Objective: This study explores the effect of voice quality and competing speaker/-s on children’s performance in a passage comprehension task. Furthermore, it explores the interaction between passage comprehension and cognitive functioning. Methods: Forty-nine children (27 girls and 22 boys) with normal hearing (aged 7–12 years) participated. Passage comprehension was tested in six different liste

Purpose: Speech signal degradation such as a voice disorder presented in quiet or in combination with multi-talker babble noise could affect listening comprehension in children with hearing impairment. This study aims to investigate the effects of voice quality and multi-talker babble noise on passage comprehension in children with using cochlear implants (CIs) and/or hearing aids (HAs). It also a

Purpose: This study examines the influence of voice quality and multi-talker babble noise on processing and storage performance in a working memory task performed by children using cochlear implants (CI) and/or hearing aids (HA). Methods: Twenty-three children with a hearing impairment using CI and/or HA participated. Age range was between 6 and 13 years. The Competing Language Processing Task (CL

In this large-scale corpus study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish Speech Framing Expressions (SFEs).While the whole SFE is taken into account in the semantic analysis, our specific focus is the finite verb of the SFE. The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as repr

Bilingual children are at a disadvantage when compared to monolingual norms in language assessment. Monolingual assessment fails to acknowledge the asymmetrically distributed linguistic competence of bilingual children, for example, different levels of mastery of family and school related concepts in the first and second languages, respectively. Consequently, monolingual assessment results in an o

Despite medical, technical, and pedagogical advances, the risk for language impairment is still much higher in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children than in hearing peers. Research on linguistic, cognitive, and communicative development in DHH children has found a range of basic spoken language deficits. Twenty percent to 50% of deaf children still meet criteria for language impairment. Tests of

What information is encoded in the cries of human babies? While it is widely recognized that cries can encode distress levels, whether cries reliably encode the cause of crying remains disputed. Here, we collected 39201 cries from 24 babies recorded in their homes longitudinally, from 15 days to 3.5 months of age, a database we share publicly for reuse. Based on the parental action that stopped th

Brain size variability in primates has been attributed to various domain-specific socio-ecological factors. A recently published large-scale study of short-term memory abilities in 41 primate species [1] did not find any correlations with 11 different proxies of external cognitive demands. Here we found that the interspecific variation in test performance shows correlated evolution with total brai

The ability to perform genomic sequencing on long-dead organisms is opening new frontiers in evolutionary research. These opportunities are especially notable in the case of museum collections, from which countless documented specimens may now be suitable for genomic analysis-if data of sufficient quality can be obtained. Here, we report 25 newly sequenced genomes from museum specimens of the mode

Gaze following refers to the ability to co-orient with others’ gaze directions. Ontogenetic studies on gaze following in animals have predominantly used human experimenters as demonstrators. It is, however, likely that developing animals are initially more attuned to individuals from their own species, which might result in differences in the ontogenetic onset of gaze following with human and cons