An official website of the United States government
Robust mate preferences despite means and opportunity for mate choice copying in an insect
- Award ID(s):
- 1855962
- PAR ID:
- 10410933
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Animal Behaviour
- Volume:
- 200
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0003-3472
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 137 to 146
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
There are two unresolved puzzles in the literatures examining how people evaluate mates (i.e., prospective or current romantic/sexual partners). First, compatibility is theoretically crucial, but attempts to explain why certain perceivers are compatible with certain targets have revealed small effects. Second, features of partners (e.g., personality, consensually-rated attributes) affect perceivers’ evaluations strongly in initial-attraction contexts but weakly in established relationships. Mate Evaluation Theory (MET) addresses these puzzles, beginning with the Social Relations Model postulate that all evaluative constructs (e.g., attraction, relationship satisfaction) consist of target, perceiver, and relationship variance. MET then explains how people draw evaluations from mates’ attributes using four information sources: (a) shared evolved mechanisms and cultural scripts (common lens, which produces target variance); (b) individual differences that affect how a perceiver views all targets (perceiver lens, which produces perceiver variance); (c) individual differences that affect how a perceiver views some targets, depending on the targets’ features (feature lens, which produces some relationship variance); and (d) narratives about and idiosyncratic reactions to one particular target (target-specific lens, which produces most relationship variance). These two distinct sources of relationship variance (i.e., feature vs. target-specific) address puzzle #1: Previous attempts to explain compatibility used feature lens information, but relationship variance likely derives primarily from the (understudied) target-specific lens. MET also addresses puzzle #2 by suggesting that repeated interaction causes the target-specific lens to expand, which reduces perceivers’ use of the common lens. We conclude with new predictions and implications at the intersection of the human-mating and person-perception literatures.more » « less
-
Noise is a common problem in animal communication. We know little, however, about how animals communicate in noise using multimodal signals. Multimodal signals are hypothesized to be favoured by evolution because they increase the efficacy of detection/discrimination in noisy environments. We tested the hypothesis that female túngara frogs’ responses to attractive male advertisement calls are improved in noise when a visual signal component is added to the available choices. We tested this at two levels of decision complexity (two and three choices). In a two-choice test, the presence of noise did not reduce female preferences for attractive calls. The visual component of a calling male, associated with an unattractive call, also did not reduce preference for attractive calls in the absence of noise. In the presence of noise, however, females were more likely to choose an unattractive call coupled with the visual component. In three-choice tests, the presence of noise alone reduced female responses to attractive calls and this was not strongly affected by the presence or absence of visual components. The responses in these experiments fail to support the multimodal signal efficacy hypothesis. Instead, the data suggest that audio-visual perception and cognitive processing, related to mate choice decisions, are dependent on the complexity of the sensory scene.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2023.03.018
