Song perception in the song sparrow: birds classify by song type but not by singer

doi:10.1006/anbe.1994.1182

Animal Behaviour

Volume 47, Issue 6, June 1994, Pages 1343-1351

https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.1994.1182 Get rights and content

Abstract

Abstract. Recent theories have identified song repertoires and song sharing among neighbours as potential obstacles to individual recognition. These obstacles can be at least partially overcome if the differing song types of an individual have common 'voice' or 'signature' traits, for these would allow a listener to discriminate between different singers' renditions of the same song type and generalize between the different song types of the same singer. Two perceptual experiments were carried out in the laboratory using operant conditioning methods, to compare the relative effects of song sharing and vocal signature traits on song discrimination. Song sparrows were first trained to classify the songs of several singers and then tested on unfamiliar song types of the same singers and unfamiliar shared songs of neighbours of the singers. Subjects failed to generalize from the familiar to unfamiliar song types of a singer, suggesting that 'voice' traits in song sparrows are non-existent or trivial at best. Subjects did, on the other hand, confuse the shared song types of different singers. These findings suggest that learning to discriminate between the shared song types of neighbours in the field may be no simple task, and that the songs of newcomers might be confused with those of residents, at least for a time.

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Cited by (67)

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It may however resemble a realistic situation if the bird perceives the playback song as the song of a stranger that happens to have a song very similar to his, or as a shared song of one of his neighbours. The neighbour possibility is plausible in those populations where neighbours share songs, a common occurrence for species who learn songs after they disperse from the natal area, such as indigo buntings, Passerina cyanea, or some populations of song sparrows, Melospiza melodia, (Beecher et al., 1994a, 1994b; Payne, 1982). The stranger possibility is plausible in circumstances where some birds learn songs in one neighbourhood and then move to another neighbourhood leading to shared songs between distant birds.
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Males recognize other individuals by their songs and rapidly learn to discriminate between song types, while remaining sensitive to the day-to-day variation in a particular type (reviewed in Searcy et al., 2014). Since sparrows apparently do not associate a particular male's song types based on common ‘voice’ characteristics (Beecher, Campbell, & Burt, 1994), listeners seem to learn each song type and associate it with a particular singer. During learning, when some song types or individuals are unfamiliar, subjects may make mistakes in their attribution of a shared song type (Beecher et al., 1994), but in at least one field study subjects responded strongly to an unfamiliar male's song even when this intruder mimicked the song type of a resident (Wilson & Vehrencamp, 2001).
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Regular ArticleSong perception in the song sparrow: birds classify by song type but not by singer

Abstract

Regular Article
Song perception in the song sparrow: birds classify by song type but not by singer