Research Overview
We study how animals communicate, recognize one another, and choose mates in the real world—where signals are multicomponent and variable, receivers are selective and resource-constrained, and the social and physical environment is noisy. Working primarily with frogs, especially North American treefrogs, we treat breeding choruses as natural laboratories for understanding how sensory systems extract behaviorally relevant information and how these processes shape the evolution of signaling. Our integrative program spans behavioral experiments, biomechanical measurements, and neurophysiology to connect mechanism, function, and evolution.
Communication in Noisy Social Scenes
Breeding choruses create complex acoustic “cocktail parties” in which dozens to hundreds of males—often from multiple species—call simultaneously. In these settings, receivers must parse overlapping signals to detect, recognize, localize, and discriminate among potential mates and rivals. Our long-term goal is to understand the functional consequences of communicating in such noise and the auditory scene analysis mechanisms that enable robust perception. We investigate how frogs exploit spectral, temporal, and spatial cues to segregate sound sources and how these cues interact with two major forms of auditory masking. Energetic masking occurs when background sounds overlap in frequency and time with a target call, reducing audibility at the periphery. Informational masking arises when background sounds are acoustically similar or unpredictable, increasing confusability and decision noise even when energy-based audibility is preserved.
Methodologically, we pair controlled laboratory psychophysics (e.g., phonotaxis with parametrically synthesized stimuli) with biophysical measurements of the auditory periphery (including laser Doppler vibrometry) and neurophysiological recordings from the auditory periphery and midbrain. This integrative approach allows us to map scene statistics onto neural representations and behavioral performance, revealing how low-level, data-driven computations support stream segregation and figure–ground extraction. By linking cue use to performance limits under both energetic and informational masking, we aim to derive general design principles for robust acoustic processing—principles that advance basic sensory biology and inspire bio‑informed strategies for signal detection and source separation in noisy environments.
Female Mate Choice in a Multicomponent, Variable World
In frogs, mate choice is mediated primarily by the loud advertisement calls males produce, which vary across and within individuals in ways that can signal morphology, condition, or strategy. Our lab seeks to understand how females evaluate this natural variation to make adaptive decisions in the complex acoustic environments of breeding choruses. We ask how females extract information from multiple call components, how they integrate those components when they covary, and how they maintain choice performance in the presence of background noise and interference.
Using laboratory phonotaxis assays with parametrically controlled synthetic calls, we quantify preference functions for individual call properties such as pulse rate, call rate, duration, amplitude, and frequency. These functions reveal both directional and stabilizing preferences and help identify the acoustic cues most relevant to female choice. We also examine how females respond when multiple call features vary simultaneously, allowing us to estimate how composite signal phenotypes influence perceived attractiveness and how natural levels of within-male variability affect choice consistency.
Beyond behavior, we are increasingly focused on the neural and neuroendocrine mechanisms that shape these decisions, linking perceptual biases and internal state to the processing strategies that underlie mate choice in noisy, real-world conditions.
Male-male Interactions in Competitive Signaling Environments
Male frogs compete intensely for access to mates, primarily by producing advertisement and aggressive calls that can both attract females and mediate interactions with rival males. Because breeding choruses can be dense and highly dynamic, males must continually assess their social environment—evaluating potential competitors, defending calling sites (often physically), and making strategic decisions about when and how to signal. Our lab investigates the mechanisms that underlie these behaviors and the evolutionary pressures that shape them.
A major component of this work focuses on neighbor–stranger discrimination and the “dear enemy” effect, in which males reduce aggression toward familiar, predictable neighbors but respond more vigorously to unfamiliar intruders. We study how males extract identity information from acoustic cues, how they learn and remember these cues, and how ecological and social conditions promote the evolution of recognition systems. In addition, we examine how males assess rivals by using spectral features—especially those correlated with body size—to estimate the likely outcomes of escalated contests.
Our research also explores the vocal repertoires used in aggressive interactions, the establishment and defense of territories and calling sites, and the plasticity of aggression thresholds as chorus density and competition levels change. Finally, we investigate signal‑timing interactions, including call entrainment, to understand how males decide with whom to time their signals and how these temporal strategies influence competition, spacing, and information flow within choruses.
Approach, Methods, and Opportunities
We are organismal biologists drawing on questions and methods from neuroethology, biomechanics, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology. Our toolkit includes laboratory psychophysics, field playback experiments, recordings of auditory evoked potentials (e.g., ABRs), single-neuron recordings in the auditory midbrain, and laser Doppler vibrometry of the auditory periphery. We pair tightly controlled experiments with ecologically grounded field work and quantitative acoustic analyses, and we synthesize across species in comparative and phylogenetic frameworks. This integrative approach positions us to collaborate across disciplines—from neuroscience and computation to engineering and conservation—and to translate biological insights into principles for robust feature extraction, source segregation, and decision-making under uncertainty.
We welcome prospective graduate students and postdocs who want to develop a cross-disciplinary skill set—from stimulus design and experimental analysis to modeling multivariate choice and neural coding—and who are excited to connect mechanisms of perception with the evolution of communication. For collaborators and partners, our program offers rigorous, transferrable paradigms for studying information processing in complex environments and for building bio-inspired solutions to real-world challenges in acoustics.