New Approaches to Studying Auditory Processing in Marine Mammals
Abstract
The long-term goals of the proposed effort are to enhance our understanding of the manner in which marine mammals process and respond to complex, real-world sounds by developing new experimental approaches to studying marine mammal auditory perception. The results of this study will provide new methodologies to enable the study of more complex features of auditory perception, such as subjective stimulus similarity/dissimilarity and auditory template matching. This specific study aimed to develop novel techniques, based upon previous studies with birds (Dooling and Okanoya, 1995), for studying auditory perceptual similarity in a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) and a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). It was proposed that subject response time (RT) would provide a useful metric of perceptual similarity. The specific objectives were as follows: (1) train the subjects for a task in which a conditioned response was provided upon detection of a change in a repeated background stimulus (i.e., an auditory discrimination task), (2) use subject RTs measured in a pure tone discrimination task to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method for describing perceptual categorization, and (3) demonstrate the effectiveness of the method for studying the discrimination of complex real-world sounds.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 30, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA601150
Entities
People
- James J Finneran
Organizations
- Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific