Developmental Social Environment Imprints Female Preference for Male Song in Mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Sexual imprinting is important for kin recognition and for promoting outbreeding, and has been a driving force for evolution; however, little is known about sexual imprinting by auditory cues in mammals. Male mice emit song-like ultrasonic vocalizations that possess strain-specific characteristics. OBJECTIVES: In this study, we asked whether female mice imprint and prefer specific characteristics in male songs. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We used the two-choice test to determine the song preference of female C57BL/6 and BALB/c mice. By assessing the time engaged in searching behavior towards songs played back to females, we found that female mice displayed an innate preference for the songs of males from different strains. Moreover, this song preference was regulated by female reproductive status and by male sexual cues such as the pheromone ESP1. Finally, we revealed that this preference was reversed by cross-fostering and disappeared under fatherless conditions, indicating that the behavior was learned by exposure to the father's song. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that female mice can discriminate among male song characteristics and prefer songs of mice from strains that are different from their parents, and that these preferences are based on their early social experiences. This is the first study in mammals to demonstrate that male songs contribute to kin recognition and mate choice by females, thus helping to avoid inbreeding and to facilitate offspring heterozygosity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".