Mouterde Solveig C, Elie Julie E, Theunissen Frédéric E, Mathevon Nicolas
Equipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle ENES-CNPS CNRS UMR8195, Université de Saint-Etienne, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
J Exp Biol. 2014 Sep 1;217(Pt 17):3169-77. doi: 10.1242/jeb.104463. Epub 2014 Jun 19.
Reliable transmission of acoustic information about individual identity is of critical importance for pair bond maintenance in numerous monogamous songbirds. However, information transfer can be impaired by environmental constraints such as external noise or propagation-induced degradation. Birds have been shown to use several adaptive strategies to deal with difficult signal transmission contexts. Specifically, a number of studies have suggested that vocal plasticity at the emitter's level allows birds to counteract the deleterious effects of sound degradation. Although the communication process involves both the emitter and the receiver, perceptual plasticity at the receiver's level has received little attention. Here, we explored the reliability of individual recognition by female zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), testing whether perceptual training can improve discrimination of degraded individual vocal signatures. We found that female zebra finches are proficient in discriminating between calls of individual males at long distances, and even more so when they can train themselves with increasingly degraded signals over time. In this latter context, females succeed in discriminating between males as far as 250 m. This result emphasizes that adaptation to adverse communication conditions may involve not only the emitter's vocal plasticity but also the receptor's decoding process through on-going learning.
在众多一夫一妻制的鸣禽中，可靠地传递有关个体身份的声学信息对于维持配偶关系至关重要。然而，信息传递可能会受到环境限制的影响，如外部噪音或传播引起的信号退化。研究表明，鸟类会采用多种适应性策略来应对困难的信号传输环境。具体而言，许多研究表明，发声者层面的声音可塑性使鸟类能够抵消声音退化的有害影响。尽管通信过程涉及发声者和接收者双方，但接收者层面的感知可塑性却很少受到关注。在此，我们探究了雌性斑胸草雀（Taeniopygia guttata）个体识别的可靠性，测试感知训练是否能提高对退化个体声音特征的辨别能力。我们发现，雌性斑胸草雀能够熟练地在远距离区分不同雄性的叫声，当它们能够随着时间推移用逐渐退化的信号进行自我训练时，这种辨别能力更强。在后一种情况下，雌性斑胸草雀能够在250米远的距离成功区分不同雄性。这一结果强调，适应不利的通信条件不仅可能涉及发声者的声音可塑性，还可能涉及接收者通过持续学习进行的解码过程。
