Department of Biology, Indiana University, Jordan Hall, 1001 E 3rd Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, Lilly Hall, 915 West State Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2018 May 16;285(1878). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2018.0713.
A common assumption in sexual selection studies is that receivers decode signal information similarly. However, receivers may vary in how they rank signallers if signal perception varies with an individual's sensory configuration. Furthermore, receivers may vary in their weighting of different elements of multimodal signals based on their sensory configuration. This could lead to complex levels of selection on signalling traits. We tested whether multimodal sensory configuration could affect preferences for multimodal signals. We used brown-headed cowbird () females to examine how auditory sensitivity and auditory filters, which influence auditory spectral and temporal resolution, affect song preferences, and how visual spatial resolution and visual temporal resolution, which influence resolution of a moving visual signal, affect visual display preferences. Our results show that multimodal sensory configuration significantly affects preferences for male displays: females with better auditory temporal resolution preferred songs that were shorter, with lower Wiener entropy, and higher frequency; and females with better visual temporal resolution preferred males with less intense visual displays. Our findings provide new insights into mate-choice decisions and receiver signal processing. Furthermore, our results challenge a long-standing assumption in animal communication which can affect how we address honest signalling, assortative mating and sensory drive.
在性选择研究中，一个常见的假设是接收者以相似的方式解码信号信息。然而，如果信号感知因个体的感官结构而异，那么接收者在对信号者进行排名时可能会有所不同。此外，接收者可能会根据其感官结构，对多模态信号的不同元素进行加权。这可能会导致对信号特征的复杂选择。我们测试了多模态感官结构是否会影响对多模态信号的偏好。我们使用褐头牛鹂（）雌鸟来检验听觉灵敏度和听觉滤波器如何影响歌曲偏好，听觉滤波器影响听觉频谱和时间分辨率，以及视觉空间分辨率和视觉时间分辨率如何影响运动视觉信号的分辨率，从而影响视觉显示偏好。我们的结果表明，多模态感官结构显着影响对雄性展示的偏好：听觉时间分辨率较好的雌性更喜欢较短、Wiener 熵较低、频率较高的歌曲；而视觉时间分辨率较好的雌性则更喜欢视觉显示强度较低的雄性。我们的研究结果为配偶选择决策和接收者信号处理提供了新的见解。此外，我们的研究结果挑战了动物通讯中长期存在的一个假设，这可能会影响我们如何解决诚实信号、交配选择和感官驱动的问题。
