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

View ORCID ProfileCatherine Perrodin, View ORCID ProfileColombine Verzat, Daniel Bendor
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.28.922773
Catherine Perrodin
Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, WC1H 0AP, United Kingdom
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  • ORCID record for Catherine Perrodin
  • For correspondence: c.perrodin@ucl.ac.uk d.bendor@ucl.ac.uk
Colombine Verzat
Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, WC1H 0AP, United KingdomIdiap Research Institute, CH-1920, Martigny, Switzerland
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Daniel Bendor
Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, WC1H 0AP, United Kingdom
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  • For correspondence: c.perrodin@ucl.ac.uk d.bendor@ucl.ac.uk
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Summary

While animals navigating the real world face a barrage of complex sensory input, their brains have evolved to perceptually compress multidimensional information by selectively extracting the features relevant for survival. For instance, communication signals supporting social interactions in several mammalian species consist of acoustically complex sequences of vocalizations, however little is known about what information listeners extract from such time-varying sensory streams. Here, we utilize female mice’s natural behavioural response to male courtship songs to evaluate 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 male songs over rhythmically irregular versions of the songs. In contrast, female behaviour was invariant to manipulations affecting the songs’ sequential organization, or the spectrotemporal structure of individual syllables. The results reveal temporal regularity as a key acoustic cue extracted by mammalian listeners from complex vocal sequences during goal-directed social behaviour.

Highlights

  • - Natural behaviour is used to probe how mouse listeners encode vocal sequences

  • - Listeners are highly sensitive to disruptions of the songs’ rhythmic regularity

  • - Female behaviour is invariant to changes in song sequence

  • - Approach behaviour is robust to the removal of syllable spectrotemporal dynamics

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted January 28, 2020.
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Courtship behaviour reveals temporal regularity is a critical social cue in mouse communication
Catherine Perrodin, Colombine Verzat, Daniel Bendor
bioRxiv 2020.01.28.922773; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.28.922773
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Courtship behaviour reveals temporal regularity is a critical social cue in mouse communication
Catherine Perrodin, Colombine Verzat, Daniel Bendor
bioRxiv 2020.01.28.922773; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.28.922773

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