Marmoset monkeys expect the melody's closing tone
Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - 10:10
in Psychology & Sociology
In speech and music, words and notes depend on each other. Humans are highly sensitive to such dependencies, but the evolutionary origins of this capacity are poorly understood. Cognitive biologists at the University of Vienna conducted playback experiments with common marmoset monkeys and found that sensitivity to dependencies might have been present in the shared ancestor of marmosets and humans. The study results were recently published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.