Courtship behaviour reveals temporal regularity is a critical social cue in mouse communication.

ABSTRACT: While animals navigating the real world face a barrage of sensory input, their brains evolved to perceptually compress multidimensional information by selectively extracting the features relevant for survival. Notably, communication signals supporting social interactions in several mammalian species consist of acoustically complex sequences of vocalisations. However, little is known about what information listeners extract from such time-varying sensory streams. Here, we utilise female mice's natural behavioural response to male courtship songs to identify the relevant acoustic dimensions used in their social decisions. We found that females were highly sensitive to disruptions of song temporal regularity and preferentially approached playbacks of intact over rhythmically irregular version

SUBMITTER: Perrodin C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10752583 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature