ArticleScience advances2018
Couples showing off: Audience promotes both male and female multimodal courtship display in a songbird.
Article in Science advances, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- How female treefrogs weigh unimodal and multimodal sexual displays in the absence and presence of noise.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Assessing flexibility in meaning and context in non-human communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- A neural circuit for context-dependent multimodal signaling in Drosophila.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Exploring the function of greeting display in a long-term monogamous songbird, the Java sparrow.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Rhythmic categories in horse gait kinematics.Journal of anatomy · 2025Article
- Choice of props for courtship dancing in estrildid finches.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Multimodal communication and audience directedness in the greeting behaviour of semi-captive African savannah elephants.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Male and female red-cheeked cordon bleus sing similar yet individualistic songs.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2024Article
- Telemetry reveals rapid duel-driven canary song plasticity in a competitive social environment.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Wild and captive immature orangutans differ in their non-vocal communication with others, but not with their mothers.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2024Article
- Solitude and serotonin: juvenile isolation alters the covariation between social behavior and cFos expression by serotonergic neurons.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Reciprocal processes of sensory perception and social bonding: an integrated social-sensory framework of social behavior.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2022Review
- The Gene Expression Profile of the Song Control Nucleus HVC Shows Sex Specificity, Hormone Responsiveness, and Species Specificity Among Songbirds.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- Group living facilitates the evolution of duets in barbets.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Tap dancers in the wild: field observations of multimodal courtship displays in socially monogamous songbirds.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2020Article
- What's in a Moment: What Can Be Learned About Pair Bonding From Studying Moment-To-Moment Behavioral Synchrony Between Partners?Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social environments can shape animal communication. Although mutual courtship displays are generally thought to function in private communication between a male and a female, we provide experimental evidence that they work in a broader social context than previously thought. We examined the audience effect on mutual courtship in blue-capped cordon-bleus, a socially monogamous songbird. This species is characterized by conspicuous courtship shared between sexes: Both sexes sing songs and sometimes add a unique dance display that looks like human tap dancing. We found that in both sexes, multimodal courtship displays (song accompanied by dance) were promoted in the presence of an audience, especially if it was the opposite sex. In contrast, unimodal displays (song without dance) were suppressed by audiences. Because birds directed the courtship dancing toward their partners (but not the audience), multimodal courtship displays are likely meant to advertise their current mating status to other cordon-bleus.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.