My research takes an integrative, comparative, and multi-disciplinary approach that draws on questions and methods from behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, human psychoacoustics, and neurophysiology to investigate animal behavior, in general, and animal acoustic communication, in particular. In my lab, we integrate mechanistic and evolutionary studies to provide answers to fundamental questions about animal communication, such as:
- How do animals encode information about themselves in acoustic signals?
- How do animals acquire information about other conspecifics through the perception of acoustic signals?
- How do these processes function in natural habitats and noisy social environments?
- How do these processes evolve?
My principal study organisms are frogs, in which acoustic communication mediates species recognition and sexual selection in terms of both female mate choice and male-male competition. Current research focuses on two major questions. First, what is the role of acoustic signaling in mediating the aggressive male-male interactions that arise from sexual selection and take place in social environments that are both temporally and spatially variable? In this context, my work investigates vocally mediated social recognition, behavioral plasticity, learning, and honest signaling in male frogs that defend calling sites or breeding territories. Second, how do females perceive the calls of a male in the noisy social environment of a dense chorus? In this context, I am investigating questions related to "auditory scene analysis" and the "cocktail party problem" - two phenomena known from human hearing research - to understand how the anuran auditory system forms "auditory objects" of acoustic signals and segregates the signals of one male from the background noise of a chorus. |
