title: Robustness of individual identity in the cries of human infants.
abstract: This study investigated the possibility that one function of the human infant's cry is to convey individual identity across distance. Six-hundred adults, having been exposed to 30 s of an infant's crying, were asked to identify this infant on the basis of other, experimentally altered, cries. The cries were altered naturally by rerecording across distance in the out-of-doors, and artificially by bandpass filtering and temporal reorganization. The individuality of cries proved remarkably robust to degradation: Only when frequencies were limited to the range of 8 to 10 kHz was recognition performance significantly impaired. It is argued that the human infant's cry, a complex signal with multiple markers of individuality, may have among its functions the communication of infants' identities across distance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs 06269-1020.
authors.forename: G E
authors.initials: GE
authors.lastname: Gustafson
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Green
authors.forename: J W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Cleland
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003448:Crying / Q000523:psychology*; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010897:Pitch Discrimination