The building blocks of ranging: What laboratory studies of distance perception can tell us

Abstract

Ranging (estimating the distance to) conspecifics is an important skill for songbirds. For example, territorial males must determine, often by acoustic information alone, whether a rival male is either within territorial boundaries, requiring an aggressive response or outside boundaries, requiring him to withhold response to conserve energy. Most field studies of ranging in songbirds measure males’ behavioral responses to playback of vocalizations seeming to originate from within or outside an established territory. However, this approach is inadequate for investigating ranging abilities in species that do not defend territories or for assessing the extent to which ranging abilities are dependent on early experience with distance. In a series of studies, a go/no‐go operant task requiring birds to discriminate vocalizations recorded at various distances was developed to ask some of these comparative questions about auditory distance perception. Results showed that a territorial species, black‐capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), learned to discriminate more quickly than a nonterritorial species, zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata), that both species learned to discriminate chickadee vocalizations more quickly, and that chickadees raised without experience with ranging could perform the distance cue discrimination task as well as field‐reared birds. [Research completed at Queens University, Kingston, Canada; supported by NSERC.]