FOOD-ELICITED VOCALIZATIONS IN GOLDEN LION TAMARINS - DESIGN-FEATURES FOR REPRESENTATIONAL COMMUNICATION

These studies were performed to determine whether, and what type of, information is contained in the vocalizations uttered by golden lion tamarins, Leontopithecus rosalia, to 12 different foods. Information encoded may be of two general types: (1) affective: When the signal contains emotional and/or individually identifying information, or (2) representational: When the signal contains information about events external to the sender in addition to any affective information. Six tamarins were presented with all possible pairs of 12 foods. Data were collected on the food chosen and on the latency to choose. Preference hierarchies were constructed for each tamarin, and a general preference hierarchy was constructed for all the tamarins. A within-groups ANOVA indicated that the tamarins had significant preference differences. The tamarins seem to divide their food into two preference categories: Preferred foods (mealworms, grapes, raisins, dried pineapple, crickets) and non-preferred foods (cooked chicken, raspberries, kiwi fruit, dried apricot, walnuts, peanuts, and sunflower seeds). The vocalization rate to the 12 foods in this study were significantly correlated with food preference scores for those foods, and there were significant differences between the vocalization rate given to preferred foods versus non-preferred foods. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) conducted on the five preferred foods revealed significant differences between the vocalizations uttered in the presence of different foods, and discriminant function analysis revealed that there was enough information in the vocalizations to correctly predict the elicitor 52% of the time, when the foods were grouped as protein, dried fruit and grape. © 1993 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. All rights reserved.