Babies’ cries alone don’t convey what they want.

A recent study found that babies' cries do not contain any clues about their cause. Researchers at the University of Saint-Etienne in France created a dataset of crying sequences from 24 babies at different ages and asked parents to note the cause of the crying. They then used artificial intelligence and human listeners to try to identify the cause based on the sound of the cries. Both the AI and the human listeners were no better than chance at determining the cause. However, the study did find that parents were often correct in their predictions about the cause of their baby's crying based on their background knowledge. The researchers suggest that a baby's cry may be more useful for signaling its identity rather than a specific category of distress. [Extracted from the article]