The Nowicki Laboratory studies behavioral ecology and neuroethology, especially questions about the function, structure and evolution of animal signaling systems. Although birds serve as a common model system in the lab, Nowicki and his students have worked on a variety of organisms including invertebrates such as insects, spiders, shrimp and lobsters, and other vertebrates including lizards, dolphins and primates. Steve Nowicki's long-time research associate (and wife) is Susan Peters. Their current work lies in three main areas. The first, done in collaboration with Bill Searcy (University of Miami), concerns the evolution of signal reliability. In the context of sexual signaling, this work has focused on how early developmental stress affects brain development and song learning in birds, thus making song a reliable signal of male quality in mate choice by females. In the context of aggressive signaling in males, recent work has examined how particular vocal and visual signaling behaviors reliably predict attacks in aggressive encounters, and how receiver-retaliation imposes a cost that maintains this reliability. A second major line of research, done in collaboration with Rich Mooney (Duke Medical School), uses the learning, development, and perception of birdsong as a model system to study brain mechanisms underlying communication. Here, recent work focuses on categorical perception of signal features, both how neurons in the bird's brain exhibit categorical responses to salient signal features and how categorical perceptual boundaries vary geographically as a consequence of learning. A third research program, also in collaboration with Bill Searcy, examines the interplay between cognition and communication, with the goal of understanding how cognitive abilities necessary for song learning and signaling associate with phenotypic and genetic differences (notably degree of inbreeding) among individuals in a population and how these associations map onto fitness and mate choice in the wild. Neeltje Boogert (McGill University) and Peter Arcese (University of British Columbia) also collaborate on this project.