Social reinforcement guides operant behaviour and auditory learning in a songbird.

Motivation to seek social interactions is inherent to all social species. For instance, even with risk of disease transmission in a recent pandemic, humans sought out frequent in-person social interactions. In other social animals, socialization can be prioritized even over water or food consumption.

Acute Aromatase Inhibition Impairs Neural and Behavioral Auditory Scene Analysis in Zebra Finches.

Auditory perception can be significantly disrupted by noise. To discriminate sounds from noise, auditory scene analysis (ASA) extracts the functionally relevant sounds from acoustic input. The zebra finch communicates in noisy environments.

Black Jacobin hummingbirds vocalize above the known hearing range of birds.

Hummingbirds are a fascinating group of birds, but some aspects of their biology are poorly understood, such as their highly diverse vocal behaviors. We show here that the predominant vocalization of black jacobins (Florisuga fusca), a hummingbird prevalent in the mountains of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, consists of a triplet of syllables with high fundamental frequency (mean F0 ∼11.8 kHz), rapid frequency oscillations and strong ultrasonic harmonics and no detectable elements below ∼10 kHz.

Ultrasonic vocalizations in golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) reveal modest sex differences and nonlinear signals of sexual motivation.

Vocal signaling is one of many behaviors that animals perform during social interactions. Vocalizations produced by both sexes before mating can communicate sex, identity and condition of the caller. Adult golden hamsters produce ultrasonic vocalizations (USV) after intersexual contact.

Olfactory responses of neotropical short-tailed singing mice, Scotinomys teguina, to odors of the mid-ventral sebaceous gland: discrimination of conspecifics, gender, and female reproductive condition.

We examined the olfactory communication of the Neotropical short-tailed singing mouse, Scotinomys teguina, by investigating whether S. teguina responded to odors produced by the mid-ventral sebaceous gland of conspecifics. Females spent significantly more time investigating male odor than an odorless stimulus or a female odor.