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Abstract

We used three years of house finch, Haemorhous mexicanus, song recordings spanning four decades in
the introduced eastern range to assess how individual level cultural transmission mechanisms drive
population level changes in birdsong. First, we developed an agent-based model (available as a new R
package called ‘TransmissionBias’) that simulates the cultural transmission of house finch song given
different parameters related to transmission biases, or biases in social learning that modify the proba-
bility of adoption of particular cultural variants. Next, we used approximate Bayesian computation and
machine learning to estimate what parameter values likely generated the temporal changes in diversity
in our observed data. We found evidence that strong content bias, likely targeted towards syllable
complexity, plays a central role in the cultural evolution of house finch song in the New York metro-
politan area. Frequency and demonstrator biases appear to be neutral or absent. Additionally, we esti-
mated that house finch song is transmitted with extremely high fidelity. Future studies can use our
simulation framework to better understand how cultural transmission and population declines influence
song diversity in wild populations.