Neural Basis of Hearing in Real-World Situations

Feng, Albert S.; Ratnam, Rama

doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.51.1.699

Cited by 89 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 136 publications

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“…These filter characteristics are believed to remain the same for a direct external input to the tympanum as well as for the internal tracheal input to the cricket ear (Robert, 2005), as the resonant properties of the tympanum are considered to mainly result from intrinsic material characteristics. In effect, their mechanical response serves as a filter, making heterospecific calls and other background noise less perceivable, and reduces the noise and complexity of the perceived acoustic world (Feng and Ratnam, 2000;Pollack, 2000).…”

Section: The Mechanical Basis Of a Flat Frequency Responsementioning

confidence: 99%

Matching sender and receiver: poikilothermy and frequency tuning in a tree cricket

Mhatre

Bhattacharya

Robert

et al. 2011

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SUMMARYAnimals communicate in non-ideal and noisy conditions. The primary method they use to improve communication efficiency is sender-receiver matching: the receiver's sensory mechanism filters the impinging signal based on the expected signal. In the context of acoustic communication in crickets, such a match is made in the frequency domain. The males broadcast a mate attraction signal, the calling song, in a narrow frequency band centred on the carrier frequency (CF), and the females are most sensitive to sound close to this frequency. In tree crickets, however, the CF changes with temperature. The mechanisms used by female tree crickets to accommodate this change in CF were investigated at the behavioural and biomechanical level. At the behavioural level, female tree crickets were broadly tuned and responded equally to CFs produced within the naturally occurring range of temperatures (18 to 27°C). To allow such a broad response, however, the transduction mechanisms that convert sound into mechanical and then neural signals must also have a broad response. The tympana of the female tree crickets exhibited a frequency response that was even broader than suggested by the behaviour. Their tympana vibrate with equal amplitude to frequencies spanning nearly an order of magnitude. Such a flat frequency response is unusual in biological systems and cannot be modelled as a simple mechanical system. This feature of the tree cricket auditory system not only has interesting implications for mate choice and species isolation but may also prove exciting for bio-mimetic applications such as the design of miniature low frequency microphones.

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Section: The Mechanical Basis Of a Flat Frequency Responsementioning

confidence: 99%

Matching sender and receiver: poikilothermy and frequency tuning in a tree cricket

Mhatre

Bhattacharya

Robert

et al. 2011

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…Hearing in nature encounters noisy environment (Feng and Ratnam, 2000). Behavioral studies from the 1950s have described the brain's automatic selection of sound; one is able to selectively listen to one sound and reject or attenuate the perception of others (Broadbent, 1952;Cherry, 1953).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corticofugal Modulation of Initial Sound Processing in the Brain

Luo¹,

Wang²,

Kashani³

et al. 2008

J. Neurosci.

121

116

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The brain selectively extracts the most relevant information in top-down processing manner. Does the corticofugal system, a "back projection system," constitute the neural basis of such top-down selection? Here, we show how focal activation of the auditory cortex with 500 nA electrical pulses influences the auditory information processing in the cochlear nucleus (CN) that receives almost unprocessed information directly from the ear. We found that cortical activation increased the response magnitudes and shortened response latencies of physiologically matched CN neurons, whereas decreased response magnitudes and lengthened response latencies of unmatched CN neurons. In addition, cortical activation shifted the frequency tunings of unmatched CN neurons toward those of the activated cortical neurons. Our data suggest that cortical activation selectively enhances the neural processing of particular auditory information and attenuates others at the first processing level in the brain based on sound frequencies encoded in the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex apparently implements a long-range feedback mechanism to select or filter incoming signals from the ear.

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“…Various species across disparate taxa must also identify and locate complex acoustic signals in multi-source environments [20][21][22] . Indeed, several groups of animals produce acoustically complex mating calls in multi-male choruses.…”

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confidence: 99%

Relative comparisons of call parameters enable auditory grouping in frogs

Farris

Ryan

2011

Nat Commun

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Whereas many studies on mate choice have measured the relative attractiveness of acoustic sexual signals, there is little understanding of another critical process: grouping and assigning the signals to their sources. For female túngara frogs, assigning the distinct components of male calls to the correct source is a challenge because males sing in aggregations, producing overlapping calls that lead to perceptual errors analogous to those of the 'cocktail party problem'. Here we show that for presentation of > 2 call components, however, subjects are more likely to group the two components with the smallest relative differences in call parameters, including relative spatial separation (a primitive acoustic cue) and relative similarity to the species-specific call sequence (a schema-based cue). Thus, like humans, the cognitive rules for the perception of auditory groups amidst multiple sound sources include the use of relative comparisons, a flexible strategy for dynamic acoustic environments.

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Neural Basis of Hearing in Real-World Situations

Cited by 89 publications

References 136 publications

Matching sender and receiver: poikilothermy and frequency tuning in a tree cricket

Matching sender and receiver: poikilothermy and frequency tuning in a tree cricket

Corticofugal Modulation of Initial Sound Processing in the Brain

Relative comparisons of call parameters enable auditory grouping in frogs

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