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Skip to Search Results- 14Black-capped chickadees
- 10Songbirds
- 5Categorization
- 5Chickadee
- 4Operant conditioning
- 3Acoustic discrimination
- 3Neil McMillan
- 3Sturdy, Christopher B.
- 2Allison H. Hahn
- 2Christopher B. Sturdy
- 2Congdon, Jenna V.
- 2Jenna V. Congdon
- 14Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS), Faculty of
- 14Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS), Faculty of/Theses and Dissertations
- 4Psychology, Department of
- 4Psychology, Department of/Journal Articles (Psychology)
- 2WISEST Summer Research Program
- 2WISEST Summer Research Program/WISEST Research Posters
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Spring 2020
Animals must assess the risk of mortality due to starvation or predation when making foraging decisions. This decision-making can be guided by cues from the environment, conspecifics, heterospecifics, or by predators themselves. Information theory predicts that high certainty cues should be...
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Information contained within a simple acoustic signal: The fee-bee song of the black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)
DownloadFall 2015
Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) are a common North American songbird that produce numerous types of vocalizations with various functions. The vocal repertoire of black-capped chickadees have been the focus of numerous vocal production and perception studies. Black-capped chickadees...
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Investigating the value of incorporating behavioural measures in a discriminant function developed for sex assignment in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus)
DownloadFall 2021
Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) are a sexually monomorphic species that typically require molecular assays or observation of sex-specific behaviours in the breeding season for accurate sex assignment. We developed a discriminant function in a central Albertan chickadee population...
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Fall 2010
Urbanization is viewed as a major threat to global biodiversity because of its role in the loss and fragmentation of low-lying, productive habitats associated with coastal plains and river valleys. My study examines the effects of urbanization on the movements and distribution of songbirds in...
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2016-01-01
Christopher B. Sturdy, Erin N. Scully, Allison H. Hahn, Neil McMillan, Jenna V. Congdon, Kimberley A. Campbell
Category perception, as Herrnstein (1990) defined it, is a powerful and pervasive cognitive ability possessed by every species in which it has been adequately tested. We have studied category perception of vocal communication signals in songbirds for over 20 years. Our first studies provided us...
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Pitch perception in vocal learners: Fundamental shared components of pitch processing and biological relevance
DownloadSpring 2013
Pitch perception is important in both music and language perception in humans. Vocal learners, including humans, share the property of learning their vocalizations from a tutor when young. Similar behavioural and neural mechanisms underlying vocal production among different species of vocal...
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Pitch perception is not unitary: Evidence for the perception of pitch chroma in black-capped chickadees.
DownloadFall 2015
Pitch perception is mediated by two attributes: pitch height and pitch chroma. These two attributes can be pitted against one another during an octave equivalence task in order to clarify the dominant perceptual mechanism. Pitch chroma mediates the perceptual phenomenon of octave equivalence,...
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The Neural Encoding of Heterospecific Vocalizations in the Avian Pallium: An Ethological Approach
DownloadFall 2011
Songbirds (order Passeriformes, suborder Oscines) have captured the attention of scientists and non-scientists alike with their vocal signals. The black-capped chickadee (genus Poecile) uses its namesake call, chick-a-dee, to convey a variety of information. In Chapter 2 and 3, I examine the...
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The perception, structure, and function of female song in the black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)
DownloadFall 2021
The black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) is a non-migratory songbird found throughout North America who communicates primarily through its numerous vocalizations, each with various functions. The vocalizations of the black-capped chickadee can be divided into calls and songs. Calls serve...