Discrimination of male black-capped chickadee songs: relationship between acoustic preference and performance accuracy

Abstract

Many species form social groups with dominance hierarchies. Often, individuals possess a status signal that indicates dominance rank. Songbirds produce songs that are used to attract mates or repel rivals and acoustic features within songs can also indicate an individual's quality, including dominance rank. Acoustic status signals have been reported in the songs of male blackcapped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), a non-migratory North American songbird. Here we used two operant conditioning tasks to examine acoustic preference for and discrimination of conspecific songs produced by males varying in dominance rank. We used a choice preference task to examine birds' preferences for listening to dominant or subordinate songs and conducted an instrumental learning task to determine if chickadees considered dominant and subordinate songs as belonging to separate signal categories based on acoustic features. Overall, our results provide little evidence that birds used open-ended categorization when discriminating, but there is evidence that songs from different geographic regions may contain acoustic similarity based on dominance rank. Consistent with previous song discrimination studies with black-capped chickadees, we found sex differences in discrimination abilities, with females learning the discrimination faster than males. We also found evidence that performance accuracy during the instrumental learning task correlates with acoustic song preference. Overall, these results suggest that when biologically relevant signals (e.g., male songs) are used as stimuli during a perceptual task, the birds' responses may be differentially affected based on individual differences among the subjects performing the task (including sex and underlying preference) and the salience associated with the stimuli (e.g., dominance rank of the singer).

Sex differences in music perception are negligible

“…In chickadees, the consistency of the ratio of frequencies between two consecutive notes (frequency ratio) in a male chickadee"s !fee-bee" song is correlated with dominance and success (Christie, Mennill, & Ratcliffe, 2004), and female chickadees outperform males on the discrimination of pitch ratios in fee-bee songs (partial eta-squared: 0.163) (Hoeschele et al, 2012). Black-capped chickedee females are also significantly quicker than males at learning to discriminate between socially dominant and subordinate male songs (Hahn et al, 2017). While the direction of sex differences varies across studies and species, the effect sizes in these non-human animals are large compared to those observed in our global sample of humans.…”

“…Examples of dramatic sexual dimorphisms in polygynous non-human species abound, with ornate plumage, elaborate vocalizations, enlarged musculature and brain circuitry for the production of courtship signals, and other visual and behavioral cues of health and vigor observed in males (Ryan, 2018;Sakata et al, 2020). Correspondingly, sexual selection has also led to sex differences in sensory processing in nonhuman animals, with a conspicuous female advantage in the sensory detection and discrimination of courtship signals in bird (Hahn et al, 2017;Hoeschele, Guillette, & Sturdy, 2012), amphibian (Bernal, Stanley & Ryan, 2007), and mammalian species (Krizman et al, 2021).…”

Chickadee songs provide hidden clues to singers’ locations

“…Chickadees undoubtedly can recognize the acoustic features of fee-bee songs and detect differences in those songs (Hahn et al, 2016(Hahn et al, , 2017Hoeschele et al, 2010;Phillmore, Sturdy, Turyk, & Weisman, 2002;Phillmore et al, 1998). To make use of coincident reverberation cues in estimating the distance to a singer, a listening chickadee would need to be able to detect and discriminate relatively small differences in intensity levels across the two frequency bands associated with fee and bee notes.…”