How to attract females: further robotic experiments in cricket phonotaxis

摘要

Choice behaviour - preferentially approaching one out of several conspecific male calling songs is considered an advanced feature of the female cricket's auditory localization ability, and is often studied from an evolution ary perspective. However it is not clear that this behaviour is not simply a consequence of the interaction of the particular localization mechanism of the cricket with the environmental constraints of spatially separated sound sources. In this paper we approach this issue through a ‘neuroethological’ analysis of the behaviour of a simple robot model of the cricket. By correlating internal and external measurements during behaviour it is shown that simple choice between two signals can occur without explicit recognition mechanisms, and performance is not degraded relative to a single source despite a noisier sensory situation. Plans to improve the model and extend the tests, to take into account more recent biological data, are described.