Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 111, Issue 46, Pages 16562-16567Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1412741111
Keywords
acoustic communication; insects; decision-making; courtship; drift-diffusion model
Categories
Funding
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [01GQ0410, 01GQ1001A]
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [SFB618, RO 547/12-1, GK1589/1]
- German Academic Exchange Service
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Decision-making processes, like all traits of an organism, are shaped by evolution; they thus carry a signature of the selection pressures associated with choice behaviors. The way sexual communication signals are integrated during courtship likely reflects the costs and benefits associated with mate choice. Here, we study the evaluation of male song by females during acoustic courtship in grasshoppers. Using playback experiments and computational modeling we find that information of different valence (attractive vs. nonattractive) is weighted asymmetrically: while information associated with nonattractive features has large weight, attractive features add little to the decision to mate. Accordingly, nonattractive features effectively veto female responses. Because attractive features have so little weight, the model suggests that female responses are frequently driven by integration noise. Asymmetrical weighting of negative and positive information may reflect the fitness costs associated with mating with a nonattractive over an attractive singer, which are also highly asymmetrical. In addition, nonattractive cues tend to be more salient and therefore more reliable. Hence, information provided by them should be weighted more heavily. Our findings suggest that characterizing the integration of sensory information during a natural behavior has the potential to provide valuable insights into the selective pressures shaping decision-making during evolution.
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