The role of spectral features and song duration in zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata, song recognition

Zebra finch song perception is assumed to primarily involve a high sensitivity to fine spectral features of song elements while other features like element sequence and song duration do not seem to have a notable effect. However, the specific features that zebra finches focus on when identifying or discriminating sounds may not be as fixed as seems to be assumed and might depend on the characteristics of the stimuli. This apparent flexibility in auditory processing, along with the potential salience of differences in song duration for song perception, highlights the need for systematic research on the acoustic parameters that zebra finches can use to differentiate between songs. By employing a GoLeft/Go-Right operant task, we examined whether and how differences in song duration affect zebra finches' relative sensitivity for spectral features and duration in song recognition. Two groups of zebra finches were trained in a Go-Left/Go-Right operant task to discriminate between either two songs with similar durations ('Equal-duration group') or two songs with different durations ('Unequal-duration group'). We assessed to what extent the birds in the two experimental groups attend to the spectral characteristics and the absolute duration of the songs by measuring the responses to test stimuli consisting of spectral modifications or temporal changes. Our results showed that zebra finches use both spectral features and song duration to discriminate between two songs, but the importance of these acoustic parameters depended on whether the songs differed in duration or not. When duration can be used as an additional feature to distinguish two songs, spectral features have a less prominent role. This outcome shows that zebra finches have cognitive flexibility in their attention to different acoustic parameters. (c) 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/).