Abstract
Animals are often confronted with more sensory stimuli than they can attend to, and so should pay attention to stimuli that are relevant to them and habituate to those that are not. We investigated attention in the fringe-lipped bat, Trachops cirrhosus, by playing repeated prey sounds to bats in a habituation-discrimination paradigm. We measured two behavioral responses: initial response and habituation rate, and also tested whether the bats discriminated between the different sounds. We found that bats habituated more quickly to sounds of unpalatable prey species, but contrary to our expectation, a bat’s initial response was unrelated to prey palatability. Furthermore, discrimination was only detectable when bats became strongly habituated and they were less attracted to the habituated sound compared to the subsequently presented sound in the stimulus pair. Our results support the idea that in nature, many sounds can draw an animal’s attention initially, but only sounds of ecological significance and perceptual salience maintain an animal’s attention over time.
Significance statement
Habituation is an almost ubiquitous way that animals filter environmental information, but is often overlooked in behavioral experiments. Animals may habituate faster to sounds that are unlikely to affect their lives and more slowly to ones that are associated with food or threats. We studied the predatory bat Trachops cirrhosus that hunts using prey sounds. We presented bats with prey and non-prey sounds and observed their responses over time. We found that although bats responded similarly to all the sounds at their onset, they paid attention longer to sounds from palatable prey and habituated quickly to sounds from inedible animals. This species initially attends to new sounds that it hears, but habituates in a way that helps it selectively attend to important stimuli.
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Data availability
The data generated in the current study are available on github at https://github.com/maydixon/Attn_Project/blob/master/Hab_and_eco_sal.csv.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute for their assistance with the permits and infrastructure. For the help in the field, we thank Anita Freudmann. For the assistance with video analysis we thank Matthew Orap and Shrenik Godiwala. For the statistics advice, we thank Nathaniel Raley, Sally Amen, and the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. We thank Gerald Wilkinson, Gloriana Chaverri, Michael J. Ryan, Claire Hemingway, Gerald Carter, and an anonymous reviewer for the helpful comments on the manuscript. We thank Damond Kyllo for the use of his illustrations.
Funding
This work was funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to MMD, a Human Frontier Science Program grant (RGP0040/2013) to RAP, an Oticon Foundation grant awarded to KH, and Danish Research Council grants to JMR.
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All experiments were licensed and approved by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (IACUC no. 2014-0101-2017) and by the Government of Panamá (ANAM: SE/A-9-14).
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Communicated by G. S. Wilkinson
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John M. Ratcliffe and Rachel A. Page are co-last authors.
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Online Resource 2
Contrasts between the estimates of the initial interest scores for the acoustic stimuli. P-values are adjusted with Tukey HSD tests. De = Dendropsophus ebraccatus, ra = Rhinella alata, rra = reversed R. alata, rp0c = reversed zero-chuck Physalaemus pustulosus, p0c = zero-chuck P. pustulosus, p2c = two-chuck P. pustulosus (DOCX 14 kb)
Online Resource 3
Contrasts between the estimates of the slopes of the interest scores for the acoustic stimuli in the habituation period. P-values are adjusted with Tukey HSD tests. De = D. ebraccatus, ra = R. alata, rra = reversed R. alata, rp0c = reversed zero-chuck P. pustulosus, p0c = zero-chuck P. pustulosus, p2c = two-chuck P. pustulosus (DOCX 15 kb)
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Dixon, M.M., Hulgard, K., Ratcliffe, J.M. et al. Habituation and ecological salience: insights into the foraging ecology of the fringed-lipped bat, Trachops cirrhosus. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 73, 101 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-019-2700-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-019-2700-1