ABSTRACT 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 (Poecile atricapillus) 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. LAY SUMMARY The current study used an operant conditioning paradigm to test whether Black-capped Chickadees can distinguish between the songs of individual female Black-capped Chickadees. Research on female song in Black-capped Chickadees has shown that female song differs from male song in sound and perception, and chickadees can distinguish between male and female song. We found that male and female chickadees can distinguish between females by listening to their song, and can do so using the whole song and only part of the song. A chickadee's ability to distinguish song by sex as well as by the individual female suggests that female song does serve a function in Black-capped Chickadees.

中文翻译：

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黑顶山雀（Poecile atricapillus）可以通过蜜蜂的歌声来识别雌性个体

摘要 个体识别是发生在许多鸟类中的一种社会行为。鸟类区分熟悉和不熟悉的同类的能力对于避免在社交互动中浪费时间和精力等资源至关重要。黑顶山雀（Poecile atricapillus）能够区分个体雌性和雄性小鸡叫声、潜在的雄性和雌性 tseet 叫声以及雄性蜜蜂歌曲。在当前的研究中，我们使用操作性歧视去/不去范式来确定雌性和雄性山雀是否可以区分单个雌性山雀产生的费蜜蜂歌曲，并测试哪些歌曲成分可以实现这种歧视。在自然类别（不同雌性的歌曲）上训练的鸟类比在随机分组的雌性歌曲上训练的鸟类更快地学会对奖励刺激做出反应，并且能够将这种学习转移到来自相同类别的新歌曲中。当暴露于奖励个体的蜜蜂歌曲的蜜蜂音符时，山雀也能够概括他们的反应；他们没有概括为费用票据。我们的结果提供了证据，表明黑顶山雀可以使用雌性制作的费蜜蜂歌曲进行个体识别。然而，个人识别背后的声学特征需要进一步研究。LAY 总结当前的研究使用操作性条件反射范式来测试黑帽山雀是否可以区分雌性黑帽山雀的歌曲。对黑冠山雀雌性歌声的研究表明，雌性歌声在声音和感知上与雄性歌声不同，山雀可以区分雄性和雌性歌声。我们发现雄性和雌性山雀可以通过听歌来区分雌性，并且可以使用整首歌曲和仅部分歌曲来区分。山雀通过性别和雌性个体区分歌曲的能力表明，雌性歌曲确实在黑头山雀中起作用。