Psychological Mechanisms in Animal Communication
This edited volume on Psychological Mechanisms in Animal Communication highlights research on the sensory, perceptual, and cognitive mechanisms that underlie signaling and receiving. It brings together researchers working on a broad range of conceptual questions in diverse animal systems and using an assortment of empirical tools. Collectively, these researchers seek to understand how signalers signal and receivers receive. This introductory chapter introduces the major questions in studies of signaler and receiver psychology that are explored in greater depth in subsequent chapters. In so doing, this chapter makes the case that a research agenda aimed at elucidating the mechanisms of signaler and receiver psychology complements and enriches several current areas of animal communication research, in particular those focused on signal design and the parallels and precursors of human language in animals. Ultimately, the goal of this volume is to lay a solid foundation for broader and more comparative studies that investigate the psychological mechanisms of animal communication. 1.1 Sights and Sounds of Spring Across a large swath of Canada and the United States, the arrival of migrant red winged blackbirds, Agelaius phoeniceus (Fig. 1.1) at the close of winter, is among the earliest and surest signs of spring. Perhaps the most common and beststudied songbird in North America (Orians and Christman 1968; Yasukawa and Searcy 1995; Beletsky 1996; Beletsky and Orians 1996) red winged blackbirds are M.A. Bee Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, St. Paul, MN, USA e mail: mbee@umn.edu C.T. Miller Department of Psychology, Neurosciences Graduate Program, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA e mail: corymiller@ucsd.edu (c) Springer International Publishing AG 2016 M.A. Bee, C.T. Miller (eds. Psychological Mechanisms in Animal Communication, Animal Signals and Communication 5, DOI 10.1007/978 3 319 48690 1_1 1 Fig. 1.1 Visual and acoustic signaling in the red winged blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus. (a) Adult male showing the red and yellow wing epaulet and solid black body. Insets in the lower left illustrate multimodal signaling in action in the form of vocally signaling males engaged in simultaneous visual displays of the wing epaulet. Inset in the upper right shows a cryptically colored female. (b) Spectrogram (top) and waveform (bottom) of a typical red winged blackbird song (oak a lee) Males often sing this song while performing the "song spread" visual display illustrated by the top left inset in (a) Attributions: The large figure in (a) courtesy of Walter 2 M.A. Bee and C.T. Miller
Animal Signals and Communication