These animals take turns to “speak,” researchers say

Oct 18, 2013 18:36 GMT  ·  By

It turns out some people would have a thing or two to learn from marmoset monkeys. Thus, a new paper in the journal Current Biology details how, after spending some time monitoring these animals, wildlife researchers came to realize that marmosets are masters of the art of polite conversation.

More precisely, it appears that, when interacting with one another, these monkeys take turns to “speak.”

Specifically, most marmoset monkeys wait for about 5 seconds for others of their kind to stop calling before they vocalize either in response, or maybe to change the topic.

“By measuring the natural statistics of marmoset vocal exchanges, we observed that they take turns in extended sequences and show that this vocal turn-taking has as its foundation dynamics characteristic of coupled oscillators – one that is similar to the dynamics proposed for human conversational turn-taking,” the researchers write in the Abstract to their paper.

Nature tells us that, until recently, it was believed that humans were the only primates that took turns when communicating with one another. Apparently, this is not the case.

The discovery that marmoset monkeys take turns in a conversation is expected to shed new light on how and why humans have evolved to be quite gifted at communicating with each other.