Discrimination of High- and Low-Threat Vocalizations: An Examination of Referential Communication in Black-Capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) Mobbing Calls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Referential communication has been defined as the exchange of information regarding an object or event, but few studies have examined referential alarm calls in songbirds. In contrast, it has been well-supported that chickadees produce mobbing calls in response to predators that vary depending on the threat level posed, and the auditory brain areas of chickadees produce similar neural expression in response to predator calls and conspecific mobbing calls of the same threat level. This suggests that chickadees perceive these acoustically distinct vocalizations as similar, potentially as referent signals. In the current study, we trained 33 birds on an operant go/no-go discrimination task in which chickadees were presented with predator and mobbing calls of high- or low-threat. Following the first round of training, birds completed a second round with high- or low-threat calls and we predicted that birds would show transfer of training when contingencies (i.e., threat level regarding a species of predator) were the same between hetero- and conspecific vocalizations. However, high- and low-threat mobbing calls were not treated similarly to the corresponding predator’s calls. Our asymmetrical results may be due to the acoustic distinction between calls produced by two owl predator species, but we cannot make definitive conclusions about referential communication from this study. Nonetheless, we believe that this experiment was an important exploration of the perception of referential signal.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".