Psychology News
Animals Adapt Their Vocal Signals to Social Situations
WASHINGTON—A special August issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, presents a host of studies that investigate the way that animals adapt their calls, chirps, barks and whistles to their social situation.
The special issue is entitled "Acoustic Interaction in Animal Groups: Signaling in Noisy and Social Contexts." The Journal of Comparative Psychology publishes articles from a comparative perspective and features original empirical and theoretical research on the behavior, cognition, perception and sociality of diverse species. It is edited by Gordon Burghardt, PhD, of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he is alumni distinguished service professor, Departments of Psychology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. This Guest Editor for this special edition was Todd Freeberg, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
“Animal communication has been a major emphasis in animal behavior and comparative psychology for many decades,” Dr. Burghardt says. “However, in recent years, we have gone beyond the straightforward analysis of dyadic interactions between two individuals. We now consider the role of eavesdropping, deception and noisy environments in shaping signals and investigate how animals deploy them in various contexts.”