Female and male zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) preferences for normal and modified songs

The zebra finch is an established model species for song preference research in songbirds. In this study, a four-way choice operant paradigm (“carrousel” cage) was used to measure the spontaneous preference of adult birds of both sexes for song stimuli of four different categories: a conspecific song, a duration-stretched version and a vocoded version of the conspecific song, and a heterospecific great tit song. In an earlier operant song discrimination experiment both male and female zebra finches treated duration stretched and vocoded song versions as being different from a normal song. This study examines how the same modified songs are treated in a preference test. The results show that females exhibited a gradient of preferences: they preferred the normal and the duration-stretched song over the vocoded version of the conspecific song, but the vocoded conspecific songs were still preferred over the heterospecific great tit songs. Males preferred duration-stretched conspecific songs over heterospecific songs, but otherwise did not differentiate among the stimuli. In contrast to the discrimination study, the current study also shows a sex difference, with female song preference for normal and duration-stretched conspecific songs being stronger than male preferences. Our results demonstrate that the importance of particular song features as obtained in the context of an operant discrimination task and of a preference test can differ. This illustrates that combining different approaches and testing paradigms may help to better understand the significance of various acoustical parameters of birdsong in relation to its social and ecological functions and their relevance to both sexes.

斑马雀作为鸣禽研究中歌曲偏好研究的典型模式物种，已被广泛认可。在本研究中，我们采用了四选一的操作性范式（“旋转笼”）来衡量成年鸟类（包括雄性和雌性）对四种不同类别歌曲刺激的自发偏好：同种个体的歌曲、时长拉伸版本和编码版本的同种个体歌曲，以及异种的大山雀歌曲。在先前的操作性歌曲辨别实验中，雄性和雌性斑马雀均将时长拉伸和编码版本的歌曲视为与正常歌曲不同。本研究旨在探讨在偏好测试中，对相同修改后的歌曲的处理方式。结果显示，雌性表现出偏好梯度的特征：她们更偏好正常和时长拉伸的同种个体歌曲，而编码的同种个体歌曲仍被偏好于异种的大山雀歌曲。雄性则更偏好时长拉伸的同种个体歌曲，但除此之外，对其他刺激没有表现出明显的区分。与辨别研究形成对比的是，当前研究也揭示了性别差异，雌性对正常和时长拉伸的同种个体歌曲的偏好程度强于雄性。我们的研究结果证明，在操作性辨别任务和偏好测试的背景下，特定歌曲特征的重要性可能存在差异。这表明，结合不同的方法和测试范式有助于更好地理解鸟鸣声的各种声学参数在社会和生态功能中的意义及其对两性相关性的影响。