Abstract：
Communication is the process by which one emitter conveys information to one or several receivers to induce a response (behavioral or physiological) by the receiver. Communication plays a major role in various biological functions and may involve signals and cues from different sensory modalities. Traditionally, investigations of animal communication focused on a single sensory modality, yet communication is often multimodal. As these different processes may be quite complex and therefore difficult to disentangle, one approach is to first study each sensorial modality separately. With this refined understanding of individual senses, revealing how they interact becomes possible as the characteristics and properties of each modality can be accounted for, making a multimodal approach feasible. Using this framework, researchers undertook systematic, experimental investigations on mother-pup recognition processes in a colonial pinniped species, the Australian sea lion Neophoca cinerea. The research first assessed the abilities of mothers and pups to identify each other by their voice using playback experiments. Second, they assessed whether visual cues are used by both mothers and pups to distinguish them from conspecifics, and/or whether females discriminate the odor of their filial pup from those from non-filial pups. Finally, to understand if the information transmitted by different sensory modalities is analyzed synergistically or if there is a hierarchy among the sensory modalities, experiments were performed involving different sensory cues simultaneously. These findings are discussed with regards to the active space of each sensory cue, and of the potential enhancements that may arise by assessing information from different modalities.
摘要：
通信是一个发射器向一个或多个接收器传递信息以引起接收器的响应(行为或生理)的过程。交流在各种生物学功能中起着重要作用，可能涉及来自不同感觉方式的信号和线索。传统上,动物交流的调查集中在单一的感官模态上，然而通信通常是多模式的。由于这些不同的过程可能相当复杂，因此很难解开，一种方法是首先分别研究每种感觉形态。有了这种对个体感官的精致理解，揭示它们如何相互作用成为可能，因为可以解释每种模态的特征和属性，使多模式方法可行。使用这个框架，研究人员进行了系统的，对殖民地pinned物种中母犬识别过程的实验研究，澳大利亚海狮Neophocacinerea。该研究首先通过回放实验评估了母亲和幼崽通过声音识别彼此的能力。第二,他们评估了母亲和幼崽是否使用视觉线索来区分它们与特定物种，和/或女性是否将孝顺幼崽的气味与非孝顺幼崽的气味区分开来。最后,了解不同感官模态传递的信息是否协同分析，或者感官模态之间是否存在层次结构，同时进行涉及不同感觉线索的实验。这些发现是关于每个感觉线索的活动空间进行讨论的，以及通过评估来自不同模式的信息可能产生的潜在增强。
