title: Perception of individuality in bat vocal communication: discrimination between, or recognition of, interaction partners?
abstract: Different cognitive processes underlying voice identity perception in humans may have precursors in mammals. A perception of vocal signatures may govern individualised interactions in bats, which comprise species living in complex social structures and are nocturnal, fast-moving mammals. This paper investigates to what extent bats recognise, and discriminate between, individual voices and discusses acoustic features relevant for accomplishing these tasks. In spontaneous presentation and habituation-dishabituation experiments, we investigated how Megaderma lyra perceives and evaluates stimuli consisting of contact call series with individual-specific signatures from either social partners or unknown individuals. Spontaneous presentations of contact call stimuli from social partners or unknown individuals elicited strong, but comparable reactions. In the habituation-dishabituation experiments, bats dishabituated significantly to any new stimulus. However, reactions were less pronounced to a novel stimulus from the bat used for habituation than to stimuli from other bats, irrespective of familiarity, which provides evidence for identity discrimination. A model separately assessing the dissimilarity of stimuli in syllable frequencies, syllable durations and inter-call intervals relative to learned memory templates accounted for the behaviour of the bats. With respect to identity recognition, the spontaneous presentation experiments were not conclusive. However, the habituation-dishabituation experiments suggested that the bats recognised voices of social partners as the reaction to a re-habituation stimulus differed after a dishabituation stimulus from a social partner and an unknown bat.
authors: Institute of Zoology, University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover Foundation, Bünteweg 17, 30559, Hannover, Germany, hanna.kastein@tiho-hannover.de.
authors: Hanna B
authors: HB
authors: Kastein
authors: Rebecca
authors: R
authors: Winter
authors: A K
authors: AK
authors: Vinoth Kumar
authors: Sripathi
authors: S
authors: Kandula
authors: Sabine
authors: S
authors: Schmidt
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception; D002685:Chiroptera / Q000523:psychology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012919:Social Behavior; D012938:Social Perception; D014828:Vocalization, Animal