Discrimination of Conspecific Songs

The effect of auditory distractors on song discrimination in male canaries (Serinus canaria).

Male songbirds such as canaries produce complex learned vocalizations that are used in the context of mate attraction and territory defense. Successful mate attraction or territorial defense requires that a bird be able to recognize individuals based on their vocal performance and identify these songs in a noisy background. In order to learn more about how birds are able to solve this problem, ...

Species Discrimination of Male Song in Gibbons

Acoustic analyses and field playback experiments were conducted to investigate interspecific song differences and discrimination in male gibbons. Songs were recorded and analyzed from males of three populations: agile gibbons (Hylobates agilis) in West Kalimantan and South Sumatra and Miiller’s gibbons (Hylobates muelleri) in East Kalimantan. Male songs from each of the three populations were p...

Male response to historical and geographical variation in bird song.

In many species, individuals discriminate among sexual signals of conspecific populations in the contexts of mate choice and male-male competition. Differences in signals among populations (geographical variation) are in part the result of signal evolution within populations (temporal variation). Understanding the relative effect of temporal and geographical signal variation on signal salience ...

Individual vocal recognition and the effect of partial lesions to HVc on discrimination, learning, and categorization of conspecific song in adult songbirds.

Among songbirds, the capacity to associate particular songs with particular singers (i.e., vocal recognition) forms the cognitive basis for more complex communication behaviors such as female choice and territoriality. In the present study, we combine operant conditioning techniques and excitotoxic lesions to the forebrain nucleus HVc to examine the role of this region in the discrimination, as...

Auditory Processing of Acoustic Communication Signals: Sensory Biophysics, Neural Coding, and Discrimination of Conspecific Songs