Visual cues of predation risk outweigh acoustic cues: a field experiment in black-capped chickadees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Foragers rely on various cues to assess predation risk. Information theory predicts that high certainty cues should be valued more than low certainty cues. We measured the latency of black-capped chickadees ( Poecile atricapillus ) to resume feeding during winter in response to cues that conferred different degrees of certainty about current predation risk: a high certainty visual cue (predator mount) and a lower certainty acoustic cue (conspecific mobbing calls), presented either alone or in combination. As predicted, chickadees took longer to resume feeding after the visual than the acoustic cue, and this effect was greatest under conditions of high starvation risk (i.e. low temperatures). Presenting both cues together produced the same foraging delay as the visual cue alone under low starvation risk, but surprisingly, resulted in lower responses under high starvation risk compared to the visual cue alone. We suggest that this may be due to prey using a form of information updating, whereby differences in the timing of perception of acoustic versus visual cues interacts with energetic constraint to shape perceived risk. Although the sequential perception of cues is likely in a range of decision-making contexts, studies manipulating the order in which cues are perceived are needed to test existing models of multimodal cue integration.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".