Experience with adults shapes multisensory representation of social familiarity in the brain of a songbird.

ABSTRACT: Social animals learn to perceive their social environment, and their social skills and preferences are thought to emerge from greater exposure to and hence familiarity with some social signals rather than others. Familiarity appears to be tightly linked to multisensory integration. The ability to differentiate and categorize familiar and unfamiliar individuals and to build a multisensory representation of known individuals emerges from successive social interactions, in particular with adult, experienced models. In different species, adults have been shown to shape the social behavior of young by promoting selective attention to multisensory cues. The question of what representation of known conspecifics adult-deprived animals may build therefore arises. Here we show that starlings raised

SUBMITTER: George I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3378612 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature