Neilans Erikson G, Dent Micheal L
University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
J Comp Psychol. 2015 May;129(2):174-80. doi: 10.1037/a0039103. Epub 2015 Mar 30.
The auditory scene is filled with an array of overlapping acoustic signals, yet relatively little work has focused on how animals are able to perceptually isolate different sound sources necessary for survival. Much of the previous work on auditory scene analysis has investigated how sequential pure tone stimuli are perceived, but how temporally overlapping complex communication signals are segregated has been largely ignored. In this study, budgerigars and humans were tested using psychophysical procedures to measure their perception of synchronous, asynchronous, and partially overlapping complex signals, including bird calls and human vowels. Segregation thresholds for complex stimuli were significantly lower than those for pure tone stimuli in both humans and birds. Additionally, a species effect was discovered such that relative to humans, budgerigars required significantly less temporal separation between 2 sounds in order to segregate them. Overall, and similar to previous behavioral results investigating temporal coherence, the results from this experiment illustrate that temporal cues are particularly important for auditory scene analysis across multiple species and for both simple and complex acoustic signals.
听觉场景中充满了一系列相互重叠的声学信号，但相对而言，很少有研究关注动物如何通过感知来分离生存所需的不同声源。先前关于听觉场景分析的许多工作都研究了如何感知连续的纯音刺激，但时间上重叠的复杂通信信号如何被分离在很大程度上被忽视了。在这项研究中，使用心理物理学程序对虎皮鹦鹉和人类进行了测试，以测量他们对同步、异步和部分重叠的复杂信号（包括鸟鸣声和人类元音）的感知。在人类和鸟类中，复杂刺激的分离阈值均显著低于纯音刺激的分离阈值。此外，还发现了一种物种效应，即相对于人类，虎皮鹦鹉在分离两个声音时所需的时间间隔要少得多。总体而言，与先前研究时间连贯性的行为结果类似，本实验结果表明，时间线索对于跨多个物种以及简单和复杂声学信号的听觉场景分析尤为重要。
