Uncertainty-based informational masking in a vowel discrimination task for young and old Mongolian gerbils

Speech sound discrimination by Mongolian gerbils

“…Thus, the effect of SNR on the discrimination of speech sounds appears to be different for gerbils and humans. This finding also agrees with previous reports on discrimination of vowels and consonants for gerbils (Eipert and Klump, 2020b;Sinnott et al, 1997;Sinnott and Mosteller, 2001) and humans (Eipert et al, 2019). The saliency for the discrimination of vowels and consonants in gerbils is qualitatively similar to that of humans as indicated by the perceptual maps, but gerbils need higher SNRs for successful speech sound discrimination (Sinnott and Mosteller, 2001).…”

Informational Masking Constrains Vocal Communication in Nonhuman Animals

“…Studies of masking in the context of acoustic signaling typically focus (either explicitly or implicitly) on energetic masking, even though informational masking is potentially more detrimental (Rosa & Koper, 2018). A few psychoacoustic studies have parsed informational from energetic masking in nonhuman animals (Branstetter et al, 2016; Cai and Dent, 2020; Eipert and Klump, 2020), and a few ecological studies have explored the idea that noise (primarily anthropogenic noise) acts as a distractor that causes animals to shift their attention away from behaviorally important tasks (Allen et al, 2021; Chan et al, 2010a; Chan et al, 2010b; Hubbard et al, 2015; Rochais et al, 2017). To the best of our knowledge, however, all such studies have evaluated the potential for informational masking outside the context of communication.…”

Novelty Detection in an Auditory Oddball Task on Freely Moving Rats

“…As such, SSA, while reflecting a kind of learning, may also itself be able to be modulated by learned information. Except for a few previous reports [31][32][33][34][35][36] , virtually all studies on SSA have been performed using sounds that did not carry any behavioural meaning. Interestingly, neurons in the thalamic reticular nucleus 37,38 , amygdala, and prefrontal cortex 39 , which are involved in selective attention 40 , also show SSA.…”