Species‐specific perceptual processes in budgerigars, canaries, and zebra finches

Abstract

Budgerigars, canaries, and zebra finches were tested for their ability to discriminate among distance calls of each species. Response latencies to detect a change in a repeating background of sound were taken as a measure of the perceptual similarity among these stimuli. Each species showed an enhanced ability to discriminate among conspecific distance calls compared to those of the other two species. Budgerigars and zebra finches also showed an enhanced ability to discriminate between conspecific calls and the calls of the other two species. Perceptually salient acoustic characteristics of these calls for each species were identified using multidimensional scaling and regression analyses. There were differences in the acoustic characteristics used by each species to discriminate among the calls. This suggests that the same acoustic features may have different communicative significance for each species. These findings support the notion that specialized processing mechanisms may be a common feature of avian acoustic communication systems.