PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Catherine Perrodin
AU  - Colombine Verzat
AU  - Daniel Bendor
TI  - Courtship behaviour reveals temporal regularity is a critical social cue in mouse communication
AID  - 10.1101/2020.01.28.922773
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.01.28.922773
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/28/2020.01.28.922773.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/28/2020.01.28.922773.full
AB  - 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