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. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
CITATION STYLE
Kastein, H. B., Winter, R., Vinoth Kumar, A. K., Kandula, S., & Schmidt, S. (2013). Perception of individuality in bat vocal communication: Discrimination between, or recognition of, interaction partners? Animal Cognition, 16(6), 945–959. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-013-0628-9
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.