MacDougall-Shackleton S A, Hulse S H, Gentner T Q, White W
Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 1998 Jun;103(6):3581-7. doi: 10.1121/1.423063.
Like humans, animals that use acoustic stimuli to perceive their world ought to be able to parse the auditory scene into functionally significant sounds. The ability to do so ought to have significant adaptive value when, for example, an animal can identify the sounds of a predator among other natural noises. In earlier work it was shown that a species of songbird, the European starling, can identify excerpts of both its own song and songs from other avian species when the songs are mixed concurrently with other natural signals. In this experiment it is demonstrated that starlings can segregate two synthetic pure-tone sequences when the sequences differ in frequency. Taken together, the experiments show that at least one nonhuman species is capable of auditory scene analysis both for natural and for non-natural acoustic stimuli. This suggests in turn that auditory scene analysis may be a general perceptual process that occurs in many species that make use of acoustic information.
与人类一样，利用声学刺激来感知周围世界的动物应该能够将听觉场景解析为具有功能意义的声音。例如，当动物能够在其他自然噪音中识别出捕食者的声音时，这种能力应该具有显著的适应性价值。在早期的研究中发现，一种鸣禽——欧洲椋鸟，当它自己的歌声和其他鸟类的歌声与其他自然信号同时混合播放时，能够识别出这些歌声的片段。在这个实验中证明，当两个合成纯音序列的频率不同时，椋鸟能够将它们区分开来。综合来看，这些实验表明至少有一种非人类物种能够对自然和非自然声学刺激进行听觉场景分析。这进而表明，听觉场景分析可能是一种普遍的感知过程，发生在许多利用声学信息的物种中。
