Jenna Congdon | University of Alberta (original) (raw)
Papers by Jenna Congdon
Animals
With many advancements, technologies are now capable of recording non-human animals’ location, he... more With many advancements, technologies are now capable of recording non-human animals’ location, heart rate, and movement, often using a device that is physically attached to the monitored animals. However, to our knowledge, there is currently no technology that is able to do this unobtrusively and non-invasively. Here, we review the history of technology for use with animals, recent technological advancements, current limitations, and a brief introduction to our proposed novel software. Canadian tech mogul EAIGLE Inc. has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) software solution capable of determining where people and assets are within public places or attractions for operational intelligence, security, and health and safety applications. The solution also monitors individual temperatures to reduce the potential spread of COVID-19. This technology has been adapted for use at the Toronto Zoo, initiated with a focus on Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) given the close physical simil...
Animal Behavior and Cognition
Journal of Insect Physiology
Journal of Comparative Psychology
Learning & Behavior
Suzuki (Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 115, 1541-1545, 2018) conducted elegant f... more Suzuki (Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 115, 1541-1545, 2018) conducted elegant field experiments examining referential communication in Japanese tits. Bond (Learning & Behavior, in press, 2019) explains some key considerations and future experimentation that should be conducted to solidify these conclusions. An important takeaway from both Suzuki and Bond is that scientists can, and should, both be excited for new, interesting scientific discoveries, and also view such findings with a critical, but collegial, eye for more parsimonious explanations and the manipulations required to test such explanations.
Category perception, as Herrnstein (1990) defined it, is a powerful and pervasive cognitive abili... more Category perception, as Herrnstein (1990) defined it, is a powerful and pervasive cognitive ability possessed by every species in which it has been adequately tested. In fact, Herrnstein was even more direct, stating that categorization had "turned up at every level of the animal kingdom where it has been competently sought" (p. 138). We have studied category perception of vocal communication signals in songbirds for over 20 years. Our first studies provided us with an understanding of songbird vocal category production and perception, clarifying perceptual categorization and the underlying mechanisms. More recent work has moved towards understanding functional vocal categories such as sex, dominance, species, and geography. Some of our most recent work has moved into the realm of conceptual knowledge, with studies aimed at understanding birds' ability to deal with concepts of sameness and danger (i.e., threat level). Here we provide key examples that effectively show the wide range of abilities possessed and used by songbirds.
Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) use their namesake chick-a-dee call for multiple f... more Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) use their namesake chick-a-dee call for multiple functions, altering the features of the call depending on context. For example, duty cycle (the proportion of time filled by voca-lizations) and fine structure traits (e.g., number of D notes) can encode contextual factors, such as predator size and food quality. Wilson and Mennill (2011) found that chickadees show stronger behavioral responses to playback of chick-a-dee calls with higher duty cycles, but not to the number of D notes. That is, independent of the number of D notes in a call, but dependent on the overall proportion of time filled with vocalization, birds responded more to higher duty cycle playback compared to lower duty cycle playback. Here we presented chickadees with chick-a-dee calls that contained either two D (referred to hereafter as 2 D) notes with a low duty cycle, 2 D notes with a high duty cycle, 10 D notes with a high duty cycle, or 2 D notes with a high duty cycle but played in reverse (a non-signaling control). We then measured ZENK expression in the auditory nuclei where perceptual discrimination is thought to occur. Based on the behavioral results of Wilson and Mennill, 2011, we predicted we would observe the highest ZENK expression in response to forward-playing calls with high duty cycles; we predicted we would observe no significant difference in ZENK expression between forward-playing high duty cycle playbacks (2 D or 10 D). We found no significant difference between forward-playing 2 D and 10 D high duty cycle playbacks. However, contrary to our predictions, we did not find any effects of altering the duty cycle or note number presented.
Zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) are sexually dimorphic songbirds, not only in appearance but ... more Zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) are sexually dimorphic songbirds, not only in appearance but also in vocal production: while males produce both calls and songs, females only produce calls. This dimorphism provides a means to contrast the auditory perception of vocalizations produced by songbird species of varying degrees of relatedness in a dimorphic species to that of a monomorphic species, species in which both males and females produce calls and songs (e.g., black-capped chickadees, Poecile atricapillus). In the current study, we examined neuronal expression after playback of acoustically similar hetero-and conspecific calls produced by species of differing phylogenetic relatedness to our subject species, zebra finch. We measured the immediate early gene (IEG) ZENK in two auditory areas of the forebrain (caudomedial mesopallium, CMM, and caudomedial nidopallium, NCM). We found no significant differences in ZENK expression in either male or female zebra finches regardless of playback condition. We also discuss comparisons between our results and the results of a previous study conducted by Avey et al. [1] on black-capped chickadees that used similar stimulus types. These results are consistent with the previous study which also found no significant differences in expression following playback of calls produced by various heterospecific species and conspecifics [1]. Our results suggest that, similar to black-capped chickadees, IEG expression in zebra finch CMM and NCM is tied to the acoustic similarity of vocalizations and not the phylogenetic relatedness of the species producing the vocalizations.
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer-Verlag Ber... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Veromessor pergandei harvester ants are group foragers which use a combination of social cues (ph... more Veromessor pergandei harvester ants are group foragers which use a combination of social cues (pheromone-marked columns) and individual cues (e.g., self-generated movement, visual cues) when exploring foraging areas for resources. Upon finding food, individuals navigate back to the column, which guides their return to the nest. The direction and length of columns change between foraging bouts, and hence the end of the column (unlike the nest location) is non-stationary. We conducted displacement tests on returning foragers and present three novel findings. First, returning individual ants accurately estimate their distance from the foraging area to the end of the column. Second, ants that reached the column but only traveled a small proportion of the distance to the nest either show homeward or random orientation; random orientation was seen when the column was long. Third, ants that have traveled most of the way back to the nest along the column show backtracking when they are displaced-orienting in the direction opposite to the nest-similar to Australian desert ants Melophorus bagoti. This commonality suggests that some navigation strategies are general across species, and are utilized by ants that navigate individually or socially.
Chickadees are high-metabolism, non-migratory birds, and thus an especially interesting model for... more Chickadees are high-metabolism, non-migratory birds, and thus an especially interesting model for studying how animals follow patterns of food availability over time.
Allison H. Hahn et al. acoustics, and computer science, gives a fuller picture of animal behavior... more Allison H. Hahn et al. acoustics, and computer science, gives a fuller picture of animal behavior than any single field of study possibly could. We begin with a brief overview of the natural history of black-capped chickadees, followed by a general discussion of chickadee acoustic communication. We next discuss the vocal production and perception by chickadees, with a major focus on bioacoustic, playback, and operant conditioning studies. We also discuss the role that development plays in vocal production and perception, and we end with a discussion of studies examining the neural correlates associated with vocal communication in this species.
Chickadees produce a multi-note chick-a-dee call in multiple socially relevant contexts. One comp... more Chickadees produce a multi-note chick-a-dee call in multiple socially relevant contexts. One component of this call is the D note, which is a low-frequency and acoustically complex note with a harmonic-like structure. In the current study, we tested black-capped chickadees on a between-category operant discrimination task using vocalizations with acoustic structures similar to blackcapped chickadee D notes, but produced by various songbird species, in order to examine the role that phylogenetic distance plays in acoustic perception of vocal signals. We assessed the extent to which discrimination performance was influenced by the phylogenetic relatedness among the species producing the vocalizations and by the phylogenetic relatedness between the subjects' species (blackcapped chickadees) and the vocalizers' species. We also conducted a bioacoustic analysis and discriminant function analysis in order to examine the acoustic similarities among the discrimination stimuli. A previous study has shown that neural activation in black-capped chickadee auditory and perceptual brain regions is similar following the presentation of these vocalization categories. However, we found that chickadees had difficulty discriminating between forward and reversed black-capped chickadee D notes, a result that directly corresponded to the bioacoustic analysis indicating that these stimulus categories were acoustically similar. In addition, our results suggest that the discrimination between vocalizations produced by two parid species (chestnut-backed chickadees and tufted titmice) is perceptually difficult for black-capped chickadees, a finding that is likely in part because these vocalizations contain acoustic similarities. Overall, our results provide evidence that black-capped chickadees' perceptual abilities are influenced by both phylogenetic relatedness and acoustic structure.
The songs of many songbird species vary geographically, yet, the songs of black-capped chickadees... more The songs of many songbird species vary geographically, yet, the songs of black-capped chickadees, Poecile atricapillus, show remarkable consistency across most of the species' North American range. Previous research has described subtle variations in the song of this species by comparing songs produced by males at distant parts of the species' range (British Columbia and Ontario). In the current study, we used an operant discrimination task to examine whether birds classify the songs produced by males in these two previously studied locations as belonging to distinct open-ended categories. In both experiments, when birds were presented with new songs, they continued to respond to songs from the same geographical location as the songs that were reinforced during initial discrimination training, suggesting that birds were using open-ended categorization. We also presented birds with songs in which we manipulated acoustic features in order to examine the acoustic mechanisms used during discrimination; results provide support that birds use the duration of the song when discriminating, but the results also suggest that birds used additional acoustic features. Taken together, these experiments show that black-capped chickadees classify songs into open-ended, geography-based categories, and provide compelling evidence that perceptible acoustic differences exist in a vocalization that is seemingly consistent across the species' range.
acoustic discrimination artificial neural network black-capped chickadee categorization female so... more acoustic discrimination artificial neural network black-capped chickadee categorization female song operant conditioning vocal communication
Animals
With many advancements, technologies are now capable of recording non-human animals’ location, he... more With many advancements, technologies are now capable of recording non-human animals’ location, heart rate, and movement, often using a device that is physically attached to the monitored animals. However, to our knowledge, there is currently no technology that is able to do this unobtrusively and non-invasively. Here, we review the history of technology for use with animals, recent technological advancements, current limitations, and a brief introduction to our proposed novel software. Canadian tech mogul EAIGLE Inc. has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) software solution capable of determining where people and assets are within public places or attractions for operational intelligence, security, and health and safety applications. The solution also monitors individual temperatures to reduce the potential spread of COVID-19. This technology has been adapted for use at the Toronto Zoo, initiated with a focus on Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) given the close physical simil...
Animal Behavior and Cognition
Journal of Insect Physiology
Journal of Comparative Psychology
Learning & Behavior
Suzuki (Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 115, 1541-1545, 2018) conducted elegant f... more Suzuki (Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 115, 1541-1545, 2018) conducted elegant field experiments examining referential communication in Japanese tits. Bond (Learning & Behavior, in press, 2019) explains some key considerations and future experimentation that should be conducted to solidify these conclusions. An important takeaway from both Suzuki and Bond is that scientists can, and should, both be excited for new, interesting scientific discoveries, and also view such findings with a critical, but collegial, eye for more parsimonious explanations and the manipulations required to test such explanations.
Category perception, as Herrnstein (1990) defined it, is a powerful and pervasive cognitive abili... more Category perception, as Herrnstein (1990) defined it, is a powerful and pervasive cognitive ability possessed by every species in which it has been adequately tested. In fact, Herrnstein was even more direct, stating that categorization had "turned up at every level of the animal kingdom where it has been competently sought" (p. 138). We have studied category perception of vocal communication signals in songbirds for over 20 years. Our first studies provided us with an understanding of songbird vocal category production and perception, clarifying perceptual categorization and the underlying mechanisms. More recent work has moved towards understanding functional vocal categories such as sex, dominance, species, and geography. Some of our most recent work has moved into the realm of conceptual knowledge, with studies aimed at understanding birds' ability to deal with concepts of sameness and danger (i.e., threat level). Here we provide key examples that effectively show the wide range of abilities possessed and used by songbirds.
Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) use their namesake chick-a-dee call for multiple f... more Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) use their namesake chick-a-dee call for multiple functions, altering the features of the call depending on context. For example, duty cycle (the proportion of time filled by voca-lizations) and fine structure traits (e.g., number of D notes) can encode contextual factors, such as predator size and food quality. Wilson and Mennill (2011) found that chickadees show stronger behavioral responses to playback of chick-a-dee calls with higher duty cycles, but not to the number of D notes. That is, independent of the number of D notes in a call, but dependent on the overall proportion of time filled with vocalization, birds responded more to higher duty cycle playback compared to lower duty cycle playback. Here we presented chickadees with chick-a-dee calls that contained either two D (referred to hereafter as 2 D) notes with a low duty cycle, 2 D notes with a high duty cycle, 10 D notes with a high duty cycle, or 2 D notes with a high duty cycle but played in reverse (a non-signaling control). We then measured ZENK expression in the auditory nuclei where perceptual discrimination is thought to occur. Based on the behavioral results of Wilson and Mennill, 2011, we predicted we would observe the highest ZENK expression in response to forward-playing calls with high duty cycles; we predicted we would observe no significant difference in ZENK expression between forward-playing high duty cycle playbacks (2 D or 10 D). We found no significant difference between forward-playing 2 D and 10 D high duty cycle playbacks. However, contrary to our predictions, we did not find any effects of altering the duty cycle or note number presented.
Zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) are sexually dimorphic songbirds, not only in appearance but ... more Zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) are sexually dimorphic songbirds, not only in appearance but also in vocal production: while males produce both calls and songs, females only produce calls. This dimorphism provides a means to contrast the auditory perception of vocalizations produced by songbird species of varying degrees of relatedness in a dimorphic species to that of a monomorphic species, species in which both males and females produce calls and songs (e.g., black-capped chickadees, Poecile atricapillus). In the current study, we examined neuronal expression after playback of acoustically similar hetero-and conspecific calls produced by species of differing phylogenetic relatedness to our subject species, zebra finch. We measured the immediate early gene (IEG) ZENK in two auditory areas of the forebrain (caudomedial mesopallium, CMM, and caudomedial nidopallium, NCM). We found no significant differences in ZENK expression in either male or female zebra finches regardless of playback condition. We also discuss comparisons between our results and the results of a previous study conducted by Avey et al. [1] on black-capped chickadees that used similar stimulus types. These results are consistent with the previous study which also found no significant differences in expression following playback of calls produced by various heterospecific species and conspecifics [1]. Our results suggest that, similar to black-capped chickadees, IEG expression in zebra finch CMM and NCM is tied to the acoustic similarity of vocalizations and not the phylogenetic relatedness of the species producing the vocalizations.
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer-Verlag Ber... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Veromessor pergandei harvester ants are group foragers which use a combination of social cues (ph... more Veromessor pergandei harvester ants are group foragers which use a combination of social cues (pheromone-marked columns) and individual cues (e.g., self-generated movement, visual cues) when exploring foraging areas for resources. Upon finding food, individuals navigate back to the column, which guides their return to the nest. The direction and length of columns change between foraging bouts, and hence the end of the column (unlike the nest location) is non-stationary. We conducted displacement tests on returning foragers and present three novel findings. First, returning individual ants accurately estimate their distance from the foraging area to the end of the column. Second, ants that reached the column but only traveled a small proportion of the distance to the nest either show homeward or random orientation; random orientation was seen when the column was long. Third, ants that have traveled most of the way back to the nest along the column show backtracking when they are displaced-orienting in the direction opposite to the nest-similar to Australian desert ants Melophorus bagoti. This commonality suggests that some navigation strategies are general across species, and are utilized by ants that navigate individually or socially.
Chickadees are high-metabolism, non-migratory birds, and thus an especially interesting model for... more Chickadees are high-metabolism, non-migratory birds, and thus an especially interesting model for studying how animals follow patterns of food availability over time.
Allison H. Hahn et al. acoustics, and computer science, gives a fuller picture of animal behavior... more Allison H. Hahn et al. acoustics, and computer science, gives a fuller picture of animal behavior than any single field of study possibly could. We begin with a brief overview of the natural history of black-capped chickadees, followed by a general discussion of chickadee acoustic communication. We next discuss the vocal production and perception by chickadees, with a major focus on bioacoustic, playback, and operant conditioning studies. We also discuss the role that development plays in vocal production and perception, and we end with a discussion of studies examining the neural correlates associated with vocal communication in this species.
Chickadees produce a multi-note chick-a-dee call in multiple socially relevant contexts. One comp... more Chickadees produce a multi-note chick-a-dee call in multiple socially relevant contexts. One component of this call is the D note, which is a low-frequency and acoustically complex note with a harmonic-like structure. In the current study, we tested black-capped chickadees on a between-category operant discrimination task using vocalizations with acoustic structures similar to blackcapped chickadee D notes, but produced by various songbird species, in order to examine the role that phylogenetic distance plays in acoustic perception of vocal signals. We assessed the extent to which discrimination performance was influenced by the phylogenetic relatedness among the species producing the vocalizations and by the phylogenetic relatedness between the subjects' species (blackcapped chickadees) and the vocalizers' species. We also conducted a bioacoustic analysis and discriminant function analysis in order to examine the acoustic similarities among the discrimination stimuli. A previous study has shown that neural activation in black-capped chickadee auditory and perceptual brain regions is similar following the presentation of these vocalization categories. However, we found that chickadees had difficulty discriminating between forward and reversed black-capped chickadee D notes, a result that directly corresponded to the bioacoustic analysis indicating that these stimulus categories were acoustically similar. In addition, our results suggest that the discrimination between vocalizations produced by two parid species (chestnut-backed chickadees and tufted titmice) is perceptually difficult for black-capped chickadees, a finding that is likely in part because these vocalizations contain acoustic similarities. Overall, our results provide evidence that black-capped chickadees' perceptual abilities are influenced by both phylogenetic relatedness and acoustic structure.
The songs of many songbird species vary geographically, yet, the songs of black-capped chickadees... more The songs of many songbird species vary geographically, yet, the songs of black-capped chickadees, Poecile atricapillus, show remarkable consistency across most of the species' North American range. Previous research has described subtle variations in the song of this species by comparing songs produced by males at distant parts of the species' range (British Columbia and Ontario). In the current study, we used an operant discrimination task to examine whether birds classify the songs produced by males in these two previously studied locations as belonging to distinct open-ended categories. In both experiments, when birds were presented with new songs, they continued to respond to songs from the same geographical location as the songs that were reinforced during initial discrimination training, suggesting that birds were using open-ended categorization. We also presented birds with songs in which we manipulated acoustic features in order to examine the acoustic mechanisms used during discrimination; results provide support that birds use the duration of the song when discriminating, but the results also suggest that birds used additional acoustic features. Taken together, these experiments show that black-capped chickadees classify songs into open-ended, geography-based categories, and provide compelling evidence that perceptible acoustic differences exist in a vocalization that is seemingly consistent across the species' range.
acoustic discrimination artificial neural network black-capped chickadee categorization female so... more acoustic discrimination artificial neural network black-capped chickadee categorization female song operant conditioning vocal communication