Look at those eyes! Marmosets share a unique characteristic with humans: In conversations, these social monkeys wait their turn to speak. During exchanges, which can last up to 30 minutes, marmosets engage in vocal turn-taking and they don’t interrupt each other, researchers from Princeton University report in Current Biology. “We were surprised by how reliably the marmoset monkeys exchanged their vocalizations in a cooperative manner, particularly since in most cases they were doing so with individuals that they were not pair-bonded with,” said Asif Ghazanfar, one of the study’s authors, in a news release. “This makes what we found much more similar to human conversations and very different from the coordinated calling of animals such as birds, frogs, or crickets, which is linked to mating or territorial defense.”
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 07:15:19 +0000
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