Bee Mark A, Micheyl Christophe
Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA.
J Comp Psychol. 2008 Aug;122(3):235-51. doi: 10.1037/0735-7036.122.3.235.
Animals often use acoustic signals to communicate in groups or social aggregations in which multiple individuals signal within a receiver's hearing range. Consequently, receivers face challenges related to acoustic interference and auditory masking that are not unlike the human cocktail party problem, which refers to the problem of perceiving speech in noisy social settings. Understanding the sensory solutions to the cocktail party problem has been a goal of research on human hearing and speech communication for several decades. Despite a general interest in acoustic signaling in groups, animal behaviorists have devoted comparatively less attention toward understanding how animals solve problems equivalent to the human cocktail party problem. After illustrating how humans and nonhuman animals experience and overcome similar perceptual challenges in cocktail-party-like social environments, this article reviews previous psychophysical and physiological studies of humans and nonhuman animals to describe how the cocktail party problem can be solved. This review also outlines several basic and applied benefits that could result from studies of the cocktail party problem in the context of animal acoustic communication.
动物经常使用声学信号在群体或社会聚集场合中进行交流，在这些场合中，多个个体在接收者的听力范围内发出信号。因此，接收者面临与声学干扰和听觉掩蔽相关的挑战，这与人类的鸡尾酒会问题并无不同，鸡尾酒会问题指的是在嘈杂的社交环境中感知语音的问题。几十年来，理解解决鸡尾酒会问题的感官方法一直是人类听力和语音通信研究的目标。尽管人们普遍对群体中的声学信号感兴趣，但动物行为学家相对较少关注动物如何解决与人类鸡尾酒会问题相当的问题。在阐述了人类和非人类动物在类似鸡尾酒会的社交环境中如何体验和克服相似的感知挑战之后，本文回顾了以往关于人类和非人类动物的心理物理学和生理学研究，以描述如何解决鸡尾酒会问题。本综述还概述了在动物声学通信背景下研究鸡尾酒会问题可能带来的一些基础和应用方面的益处。
