Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria.
Integr Zool. 2023 Jul;18(4):720-735. doi: 10.1111/1749-4877.12670. Epub 2022 Aug 26.
Some multimodal signals-that is, occurring in more than one sensory modality-appear to carry additional information which is not present when component signals are presented separately. To understand the function of male ring dove's (Streptopelia risoria) multimodal courtship, we used audiovisual playback of male displays to investigate female response to stimuli differing in their audiovisual timing. From natural courtship recordings, we created a shifted stimulus where audio was shifted relative to video by a fixed value and a jittered stimulus, where each call was moved randomly along the visual channel. We presented 3 groups of females with the same stimulus type, that is, control, shifted, and jittered, for 7 days. We recorded their behavior and assessed pre- and post-test blood estradiol concentration. We found that playback exposure increased estradiol levels, confirming that this technique can be efficiently used to study doves' sexual communication. Additionally, chasing behavior (indicating sexual stimulation) increased over experimental days only in the control condition, suggesting a role of multimodal timing on female response. This stresses the importance of signal configuration in multimodal communication, as additional information is likely to be contained in the temporal association between modalities.
一些多模态信号——即发生在超过一种感觉模态中的信号——似乎携带了额外的信息，而这些信息在单独呈现组成信号时并不存在。为了理解雄性环鸽（Streptopelia risoria）多模态求偶的功能，我们使用雄性展示的视听回放来研究女性对不同视听定时刺激的反应。从自然求偶记录中，我们创建了一个移位刺激，其中音频相对于视频固定值移位，以及一个抖动刺激，其中每个叫声随机沿视觉通道移动。我们为 3 组雌性提供相同的刺激类型，即对照、移位和抖动，持续 7 天。我们记录了它们的行为，并评估了测试前后的血液雌二醇浓度。我们发现播放暴露增加了雌二醇水平，证实了这种技术可以有效地用于研究鸽子的性通讯。此外，只有在对照条件下，追逐行为（表示性刺激）在实验期间才会增加，这表明多模态定时对女性反应有作用。这强调了信号配置在多模态通讯中的重要性，因为额外的信息可能包含在模态之间的时间关联中。
