The common marmoset, a small, South American monkey, uses an array of chirps, whistles and trills to defend its territory, flag the discovery of food, warn of danger and find family members hidden by dense forest foliage. Marmosets also use distinct calls to address different individuals, in much the same way that people use names, new research suggests.
Until this year, only humans, dolphins and parrots were known to use names when communicating. In June, however, scientists reported that African elephants appeared to use names, too; researchers made the discovery by using artificial intelligence-powered software to detect subtle patterns in the elephants’ low-pitched rumbles. In the new study, which was published in Science, a different team of researchers also used AI to uncover namelike labels hiding in the calls of common marmosets.
“I think what it’s telling us is that it’s likely that animals actually have names for each other a lot more than maybe we ever conceived,” said George Wittemyer, a conservation biologist at Colorado State University who led the recent elephant study but was not involved in the marmoset research.
Marmosets produce whistlelike “phee calls” to communicate with other marmosets who might be hidden among the treetops. “They start to exchange phee calls when they lose eyesight of each other,” said David Omer, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who led the new study.
The researchers studied 10 captive marmosets, analyzing the phee calls they made. Two monkeys at a time were brought to a study room and placed in separate enclosures. The marmosets were allowed to see their conversational partners briefly before a curtain was placed between them.
The researchers recorded the phee calls the marmosets made after the curtain came down. They then fed the calls into a machine learning system, which detected differences between the calls directed at individual monkeys. — EMILY ANTHES/NYT
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