A strategic taxonomy of biological communication

Abstract

The rapid increase in the understanding of biological communication has been largely theory driven. Game-theoretical models have completely changed how behavioural biologists think about communication. These theories are widely cited, but much of the theoretical work remains only vaguely understood by the wide majority of those who make use of it. Critical terms and concepts have not been sufficiently well defined to provide a solid common foundation for theoretical work as a unified whole. In this paper, we synthesize the relevant theoretical work, and describe its relation to more classical thinking within the study of animal behaviour. We present a taxonomy of biological communication and signals. This taxonomy is based upon the structure and properties of extensive-form game models of communication. We then classify many influential models of communication according to the structure of their extensive-form representations. Finally, we link signal taxonomy and extensive form to show how the temporal structure of a modelled interaction determines the type of signal the model will produce. We argue that this intuitive form of modelling is the correct one for unifying terminology and theory.