An animal’s position in space and time determines its ability to collect information about the world around it. These ‘spatio-temporal’ concerns are of particular importance to animals engaged in communication with each other: the relative positioning of sender and receiver over time can help to optimize information exchange or hamper it. One key reason for this is that sensory systems and the signals that stimulate them are often highly directional. Take, for example, the courtship display of the male broad-tailed hummingbird, which involves a dramatic high-speed dive, a loud feather-generated sound, and a stunning flash of his iridescent throat. For maximum effect on a prospective mate, the male must time and place these elements of his display perfectly, coordinated with millisecond and millimeter precision. If he doesn’t align his feathers just right in relation to the sun and her perch, his magenta flash doesn’t quite go off. And the female must be looking directly at him. If he’s in the corner of her eye, she may miss most of the show. But how are such spatio-temporal dynamics coordinated by those involved? And do individuals differ in their ability to navigate space and time in ways that impact their success in communication and associated decision-making? In other words, how and why might this aspect of animal communication evolve? Answers to these deceptively simple questions require integration of insights from a number of scientific fields, including neuroscience, cognitive ecology, biomechanics, sensory ecology, computer science, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy. Such integration, although challenging, promises to open exciting new avenues of inquiry that should pay dividends across these fields and beyond. This workshop and symposium series will bring researchers from various field together to begin addressing these questions and others to better understand how signaling is impacted by time and position. Early career and researchers from underrepresented groups will be recruited to participate at all steps to broaden the investigative process and audience for this work.
The organizing team will coordinate a workshop and symposium, hosted at consecutive annual meetings of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, to draw together researchers from these different disciplines in discussions about interdisciplinary approaches and novel transdisciplinary paradigms for investigating spatio-temporal dynamics in animal communication. The initial, one-day workshop will partner early career researchers with interdisciplinary clusters of invited faculty to discuss major challenges, key knowledge gaps, and research boundaries in need if increased interdisciplinary crosstalk. These working clusters will then identify a profitable topic for further study in the subsequent 12 months, with a presentation and/or working paper to emerge from such efforts. The follow-up symposium will showcase workshop products alongside cutting edge research in three thematic sessions. One session will address receiver encoding of complex signals from neurobiological, cognitive, and philosophical perspectives. Talks in this session will address how variation in signal spatio-temporal dynamics impact attention, habituation, learning, localization, and scene analysis. The second session will consider biomechanical, neurophysiological, and ecological constraints on display production, with talks addressing both display performance as well as directing displays effectively toward appropriate receivers. The third session will focus on machine learning and social network tool development to characterize spatio-temporal dynamics, as common methods for examining relatively simple displays in dyadic interactions do not capture the full range of features relevant in complex communication networks.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
