All "chick-a-dee" calls are not created equally. Part I. Open-ended categorization of chick-a-dee calls by sympatric and allopatric chickadees.
Researchers trained 24 black-capped (Poecile atricapillus) and 12 mountain (P. gambeli) chickadees in an operant conditioning task to determine if they use open-ended categorization to classify "chick-a-dee" calls, and whether black-capped chickadees that had experience with mountain chick-a-dee calls (sympatric group) would perform this task differently than inexperienced black-capped chickadees (allopatric group). All experimental birds learned to discriminate between species' call categories faster than within a category (Experiment 1), and subsequently classified novel and original between-category chick-a-dee calls in Experiments 2 and 3 following a change in the category contingency. These results suggest that regardless of previous experience, black-capped and mountain chickadees classify their own and the other species' calls into two distinct, yet open-ended, species-level categories.
Bloomfield
Laurie L
LL
Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Sturdy
Christopher B
CB
D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D004455:Echolocation; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior; D020308:Songbirds; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013663:Teaching