Meeting Abstract
House mice use multimodal signals (e.g., auditory and olfactory) intersexual communication. However, more studies have been done on how females respond to signals from males than how males respond to signals from females. This is important because males and females can both send and receive signals during communication. Moreover, most studies tend to study nonvocal and vocal response behaviors separately instead of looking into the relationships between them; nevertheless, this relationship may give us new insights about the functions of multimodal signals. We presented female ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs), squeaks, and urine as unimodal signals and USVs+urine and squeaks+urine as multimodal signals to test male behavioral responses. We used the numbers of ultrasonic vocalizations as vocal behaviors and the duration of investigation, digging and rearing as nonvocal behaviors. We studied the correlations between each nonvocal and vocal behavior. We predicted that the correlations between male behaviors would only exist under multimodal conditions because increased information about females might cause males to produce vocal and nonvocal behaviors. .Our results supported our predictions, in that behavioral correlations only occurred during multimodal conditions. Specifically, the correlation between male investigation and USVs existed under female squeaks+urine condition and the correlation between male digging and USVs existed under female USVs+urine condition. Our results suggested that multimodal signals are more salient than unimodal signals. At the same time, correlations may have emerged because multimodal signals elicit the highest male response rate, creating a range in which individual variation can be observed.
