Ten best performing models.

<p>Model of size four (light gray), three (dark gray), and two (black edging) are ranked top ten. The overall best performing model uses the pulse period, chirp duration, and chirp duty cycle. The best 2-feature model (pulse period and chirp pause) did not perform significantly different ( for a two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sums test; significance level of 0.01). The best 4-feature model (pulse duration, pulse pause, chirp duration, and chirp period) performed significantly worse than the best 3-feature model ( for a two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sums test). Abbreviations: Pdur - pulse duration, Ppau - pulse pause, Pper - pulse period, Pdc - pulse duty cycle, Cdur - chirp duration, Cpau - chirp pause, Cper - chirp period, Cdc - chirp duty cycle. The models were validated 100 times and errorbars indicate standard deviation.</p

Artificial song pattern of the cricket <i>Gryllus bimaculatus</i> and its temporal features.

<p>Typically, a calling song consists of repetitive pulses that are grouped into chirps. The temporal structure of an artificial song pattern is fully determined by four descriptors, e.g. the duration and pause for both pulses and chirps. Four additional descriptors are frequently used to characterize cricket songs, namely the period (the sum of duration and pause), and the duty cycle (the ratio of duration and period) for both, the short and the long time scale.</p

Interaction of the short and long time scale.

<p>(A) Sketch of a logical AND-operation (central square) and an OR-operation (gray shading). (B) Chirp period - pulse period response field predicted by the best 4-feature model (pulse duration, pulse pause, chirp duration, chirp period). The dominant circular area of highest response values suggests an AND-operation. Circles indicate experimentally measured phonotactic scores.</p

Network diagram and predictive performance of the best 4-feature model.

<p>(A) The network diagram consists of four input neurons representing temporal calling song features, which project to input-evaluating neurons in the hidden layer. These in turn project to the output neuron mimicking the relative phonotactic score; abbreviations: Pdur - pulse duration, Ppau - pulse pause, Cdur - chirp duration, Cper - chirp period. (B) Correlation between the phonotactic score of 18 test samples predicted by the best 4-feature model and the experimentally measured scores. Each dot shows the mean phonotactic score for a given song pattern that was presented to on average 31 females and tested for 100 times with the model. The errorbars indicate standard deviation across individual females (horizontal) and across 100 repeated model simulations (vertical). The solid regression line has a slope of 0.73. The performance: and .</p