Humans share acoustic preferences with other animals
James, L. S.; Woolley, S. C.; Sakata, J. T.; Hilton, C. B.; Ryan, M. J.; Mehr, S. A.
Show abstract
Many animals produce sounds during courtship and receivers prefer some sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergent evolution may generate similarities in preference across species and could underlie Darwins conjecture that some animals "have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have". Here, we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a wide range of animals, that the strength of human preferences correlates with that in other animals, and that human responses are quicker when in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we found greatest agreement in preference for adorned, evolutionarily ancestral, and lower frequency sounds. Humans music listening experience was associated with preferences. These results are consistent with theories arguing that biases in sensory and cognitive processing sculpt acoustic preferences and confirm Darwins century-old hunch about the conservation of aesthetics in nature.
Matching journals
The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.