Overview
- Published March 19 in Science, the study had 4,196 participants worldwide judge 110 paired mating calls drawn from prior animal preference tests across frogs, birds, mammals, and insects.
- Humans were more likely than chance to pick the call animals preferred, and they made those selections more quickly when animals showed stronger preferences.
- Lower pitch and acoustic adornments such as trills, clicks, and chucks were linked to higher agreement between human choices and animal mate preferences.
- Expertise with animal sounds or formal musical training did not improve alignment, while people who reported more daily music listening showed slightly greater concordance.
- Authors propose shared sensory-system architecture as a provisional explanation and note notable outliers across taxa, calling for follow-up work on neural mechanisms and other senses.