I remember you; Experimental evidence of true acoustic individual recognition in a wild passerine.

Abstract

Abstract True individual recognition refers to an animal's ability to recognise at least one unique feature of another individual. Demonstrating this in animals equivocally can be difficult, as it requires confounding variables such as location, kinship or familiarity to be carefully controlled. This is problematic, as a poor understanding of how individual recognition operates limits our understanding of pathways that shape intelligence, sociality, and cooperation in taxa. Noisy miners (Manorina melanocephala) are a highly social bird that exhibits multiple cooperative behaviours accompanied by functionally referential vocal signals, providing an ideal model for studying recognition. We employed an adapted habituation-discrimination paradigm to experimentally demonstrate true individual recognition in miners, as a receiver’s habituation to a calling individual transferred across different social contexts. This was observed in wild birds that were not subject to any additional training, and exhibited even by receivers exposed to novel signallers. These findings have significant implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying avian cooperation and cognition in complex animal societies, and indicate that recognition in this species is likely based on individual vocal characteristics.