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Mating with another species is often maladaptive because it generally results in no or low-fitness offspring. When hybridization is sufficiently costly, individuals should avoid mating with heterospecifics even if it reduces their ability to mate with high-quality conspecifics that resemble heterospecifics. Here, we used spadefoot toads, Spea multiplicata, to evaluate whether females alter their preferences for conspecific male sexual signals (call rate) depending on heterospecific presence. When presented with conspecific signals against a background including both conspecific and heterospecific signals, females preferred male traits that were most dissimilar to heterospecifics—even though these signals are potentially associated with lower-quality mates. However, when these same females were presented with a background that included only conspecific signals, some females switched their preferences, choosing conspecific signals that were exaggerated and indicative of high-quality conspecific mates. Because only some females switched their preferences between these two chorus treatments, there was no population-level preference for exaggerated conspecific male signals in the absence of heterospecifics. These results show that hybridization risk can alter patterns of mate choice and, consequently, sexual selection on male signals. Moreover, they emphasize that the strength and expression of reproductive barriers between species (such as mate choice) can be context-dependent.
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Revealed strength of preference: Inference from response times
Revealed preference is the dominant approach for inferring preferences, but it is limited in that it relies solely on discrete choice data. When a person chooses one alternative over another, we cannot infer the strength of their preference or predict how likely they will be to make the same choice again. However, the choice process also produces response times (RTs), which are continuous and easily observable. It has been shown that RTs often decrease with strength-of-preference. This is a basic property of sequential sampling models such as the drift diffusion model. What remains unclear is whether this relationship is sufficiently strong, relative to the other factors that affect RTs, to allow us to reliably infer strength-of-preference across individuals. Using several experiments, we show that even when every subject chooses the same alternative, we can still rank them based on their RTs and predict their behavior on other choice problems. We can also use RTs to predict whether a subject will repeat or reverse their decision when presented with the same choice problem a second time. Finally, as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that it is also possible to recover individual preference parameters from RTs alone. These results demonstrate that it is indeed possible to use RTs to infer preferences.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1554837
- PAR ID:
- 10288586
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Judgment and decision making
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1930-2975
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 381-394
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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