In a classic scene from NBC's The Office, Michael Scott (the office manager and villain/buffoon of the show) drives his car into a lake because his onboard GPS has told him to turn right. While driving into the water, his passenger Dwight Schrute (assistant to the manager) tries to correct the obvious blunder, but Michael shouts 'the machine knows!' and ploughs ahead. Hopefully, nobody reading this has had to extract his car from a body of water because he put too much faith in the instructions from a GPS. However, being led astray by a navigation system is probably all too familiar. Which begs the question, why pay attention to a source that is unreliable? This is the subject of the current study by Timothy Polnaszek and David Stephens from the University of Minnesota. Reliability has been a central issue in animal communication for decades. But, most of the research has focused on the sender (in my example, the GPS). In many situations, animal senders might benefit from lying; for example, a weak male could benefit from signalling strength, if that were enough to scare away a better opponent. So, research has focused on the issue of what keeps senders from lying. Much less attention has been paid to the receiver (in my example, Michael). What affects a receiver's willingness to follow potentially unreliable signals?
Polnaszek and Stephens tackle this question by training pairs of blue jays, Cyanocitta cristata, in adjacent cages to play a simple communication game (Fig. 2). The sender blue jay 'signals' to the partner by choosing a particular perch, and the receiver blue jay responds by choosing either a corresponding or an opposite perch, depending on the circumstances, in its own cage. The benefit of this somewhat artificial system is that the researchers can manipulate key aspects of the jays' communication. Polnaszek and Stephens can make the signaller more or less reliable (for example, in some cases, the signaller is trained to follows lights viewable only to it when choosing a perch); they can manipulate how 'gullible' the receiver is (for example, sometimes the receiver follows private lights when responding instead of freely responding to its partner’s signal); and they can manipulate whether the pair are competing or cooperating (for example, sometimes the signaller receives a food reward if it tricks the receiver; other times the signaller receives a food reward if it guides the receiver to the 'correct' perch). What factors play into how tolerant the receiver is of unreliable signalling?
(a) The sender blue jay at one of the signal perches in its enclosure. The sender can ‘signal’ to the receiver blue jay which perch offers a reward (either reliably or unreliably). (b) A view of the signal from the receiver's perspective. The receiver responds to the signal by choosing a perch, either one corresponding to the signaller's position or one on the opposite side of its enclosure (not shown). In some cases, receiver choice was manipulated via the lights shown. Otherwise, the receiver was free to use the signal or choose based on its own experiences (such as the frequency of reward at each of the perches). Photo: Timothy Polnaszek.
Click to view the full editorial by Ana Sendova-Franks (Executive Editor) and Michelle P. Scott (Executive Editor): http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.07.001