Do female zebra finches (<i>Taeniopygia guttata</i>) copy each other's mate preferences?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated whether female zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) would alter their mate preferences after observing the choices of other females. Experimental trials consisted of four 30-min stages: (A) acclimation, (B) observer female chooses between two males, (C) observer female watches a model female interact with her nonpreferred male from stage B, and (D) observer female again chooses between the two males. Control trials were identical except that there was no model female in stage C. Females in both experimental and control trials spent significantly more time with the nonpreferred male in stage D than they had in stage B; thus, our experiment appeared to reveal no evidence of mate choice copying. There was, however, a significant positive relationship between the increase in the time that an observer female in experimental trials spent with her nonpreferred male in stage D and the number of interactions that she had previously observed between the model female and that male in stage C. A second experiment of similar design, where observer females were prevented from observing the model female and nonpreferred male interact in stage B, demonstrated that the behaviour of the observer female in the first experiment was not simply a response to changes in male behaviour in stage D. While our experiment does not support the hypothesis that female zebra finches copy each other's mate preferences, our findings suggest that public information may influence the behaviour of female zebra finches toward potential mates.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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".