Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 78, Issue 2, August 2009, Pages 233-240
Animal Behaviour

Essay
What do animal signals mean?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.06.007Get rights and content

Animal communication studies often use analogies to human language and related constructs such as information encoding and transfer. This commonality is evident even when research goals are very different, for example when primate vocalizations are proposed to have word-like meaning, or sexually selected signals are proposed to convey information about a signaller's underlying quality. We consider some of the ambiguities and limitations inherent in such informational approaches to animal communication as background to advocating alternatives. The alternatives eschew language-based metaphors and broader informational constructs and focus instead on concrete details of signal design as they reflect and interact with established sensory, physiological and psychological processes that support signalling and responding in listeners. The alternatives we advocate also explicitly acknowledge the different roles and often divergent interests of signallers and perceivers that can yield fundamental asymmetries in signalling interactions, and they therefore shift the focus of interpretations of animal communication from informing others to influencing others.

Section snippets

The role of information in communication theory

The concept of information features prominently in most sciences, but how it is invoked and applied as an explanatory construct varies greatly. For example, Dall et al. (2005, page 192) recently observed that ‘evolutionary and behavioural ecologists do not adopt consistent, rigorous concepts of information… [instead] informal use of the term information is the norm’. Dall et al. go on to consider how such traditionally loose and informal concepts of information are now inadequate for many of

Primate communication and the metaphor of language

Studies of primate communication are often couched in the metaphor of language where meaning is the central explanatory construct and arises from the common representational states of speakers and listeners. This representational parity in language occurs when the speaker and the listener have similar representational processes that ensure corresponding coding and decoding of signal meaning. The details of signal design are not critical. Indeed the design, or form, of most words is thought to

Sexual selection and acoustic communication

These same themes of information versus influence emerge in a completely different domain, namely sexual selection and communication. Much of this work is conducted with taxa (e.g. birds, frogs, fish, insects) for which the language metaphor has far less intrinsic appeal. Nevertheless, similar informational constructs have been central in this research area as well (Zahavi and Zahavi, 1997, Bradbury and Vehrencamp, 2000). Here, the emphasis is on the information males provide to females in

Concluding remarks

We conclude by returning to the overarching questions that framed this essay. ‘What do animal signals mean?’ ‘What information do they convey?’ These are the common and core questions that structure a great many research programmes in animal communication, if sometimes only implicitly. Our argument is that, explicit or otherwise, the questions are ill-posed. They reflect a natural but loose casting of animal communication systems in linguistic or informational terms. Although the loosely

Acknowledgments

For generous grant support over the years, we thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada and the NIH and the NSF of the United States. We are grateful to several referees for their valuable comments on the manuscript.

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    1

    M. J. Owren is at the Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 5010, Atlanta, Georgia 30302-5010, U.S.A.

    2

    M. J. Ryan is at the Section of Integrative Biology, 1 University Station, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712, U.S.A.

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