Data from: Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) can identify individual females by their fee-bee songs

Individual recognition is a social behavior that occurs in many bird species. A bird's ability to discriminate among familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics is critical to avoid wasting resources such as time and energy during social interactions. Black-capped Chickadees are able to discriminate individual female and male chick-a-dee calls, potentially male and female tseet calls, and male fee-bee songs. In the current study, we used an operant discrimination go/no-go paradigm to determine whether female and male chickadees could discriminate between fee-bee songs produced by individual female chickadees as well as test which song component(s) enable this discrimination. Birds trained on natural categories—the songs of different females—learned to respond to rewarded stimuli more quickly than birds trained on random groupings of female songs and were able to transfer this learning to new songs from the same categories. Chickadees were also able to generalize their responding when exposed to the bee note of the fee-bee song of rewarded individuals; they did not generalize to fee notes. Our results provide evidence that Black-capped Chickadees can use female-produced fee-bee songs for individual recognition. However, the acoustic features underlying individual recognition require further investigation.

个体识别是一类广泛存在于多种鸟类中的社会行为。鸟类区分同类熟悉个体与陌生个体的能力，对于避免在社会互动中浪费时间与精力等资源至关重要。黑顶山雀（Black-capped Chickadees）能够区分雌性与雄性的chick-a-dee叫声，亦可识别潜在的雌雄两性tseet叫声，以及雄性的fee-bee鸣唱。本研究采用操作性辨别Go/No-Go范式，旨在探究雌雄黑顶山雀能否辨别雌性个体产生的fee-bee鸣唱，同时测试究竟是鸣唱的哪些组成部分支撑了该辨别能力。接受自然类别训练的受试个体——即训练素材为不同雌性个体的鸣唱——相较于接受随机分组雌性鸣唱训练的受试个体，能够更快地对奖励性刺激做出反应，且可将习得的辨别能力迁移至来自同一类别的全新鸣唱中。当受试黑顶山雀接触到奖励个体fee-bee鸣唱中的bee音段时，同样能够泛化其反应模式；但并未对fee音段产生反应泛化。本研究结果证实，黑顶山雀可借助雌性个体发出的fee-bee鸣唱完成个体识别。然而，支撑其个体识别的声学特征仍有待进一步深入探究。