Wild tree squirrels respond with multisensory enhancement to conspecific robot alarm behaviour.

By S. Partan, Christian P. Larco, Max Owens. 2009

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Natural social communication in animals involves the use of multiple sensory channels but has traditionally been easier to study one channel at a time. As a consequence we know more about the simplified situation of unitary signal channels than we do about the natural situation in which these sources are integrated. Studies of single channels of communication underestimate, and can even misrepresent, the salience and meaning of messages that are normally communicated via multiple channels. However, new mechanical or robotic animal models allow us to test the meaning of multiple components of a signal, via multiple sensory channels. Being three-dimensional, they also allow these questions to be tested in natural field settings where ambient light may constrain other methods such as video playback. Robotic models have been successfully tested with wild amphibians, reptiles and birds. Here we show that a wild mammal, the eastern grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, responds to a robotic model displaying alarm behaviour. Wild squirrels showed enhanced responses to multisensory, audio/visual signals of alarm compared to unisensory (either audio or visual) signals. This is significant for studies of the evolution of communication in that it underscores the importance of taking the complete signal into account, and it provides a method for studying multisensory communication in wild mammals. It is also important for studies of sensory integration, since the squirrels showed an enhanced behavioural response to multisensory signals, providing an overt parallel to brain mechanisms of other mammals that show neural enhancement to multisensory stimuli.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Sensory Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2ed9405f142f163969097388aada1e8d701977e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental Biology

1. B. Waller
2. K. Slocombe
3. Katja Liebal
4. S. Partan

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. K. Slocombe
2. B. Waller
3. Katja Liebal
4. J. Redmond
5. A. G. Fulmer
6. S. Partan
7. Maya A. M. Gounard

Citations in the corpus

• The language void: the need for multimodality in primate communication research (2011, background): “Recent work presenting robotic models to wild tree squirrels, Sciurus carolinensis, has established that although unimodal visual or auditory signals do elicit antipredator behaviour in receivers, the strongest responses come from the combined multimodal signal (Partan et al. 2009).”
• Multimodal alarm behavior in urban and rural gray squirrels studied by means of observation and a mechanical robot (2010, methodology): “We therefore predicted that, as with the Florida squirrels (Partan et al., 2009), the Massachusetts squirrels studied here would show redundant responses to both visual and vocal components of their alarm be- havior.”
• Multisensory perception in uncertain environments (2012, unknown): “We found 2 studies where a cross-modal predator stimulus evoked enhanced antipredator behavior (Smith and Belk 2001; Partan et al. 2009) such that 2 simultaneous predator cues were perceived as more risky than either cue alone.”