Temporal Coherence for Complex Signals in Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and Humans (Homo sapiens) (original) (raw)

Journal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983), 2015

Abstract

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 beh...

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