Perceptual and Neural Mechanisms of Auditory Scene Analysis in the European Starling

Abstract

Humans and many other animals, such as songbirds, communicate acoustically in large, dense social groups. In such environments, the signals produced by different signalers commonly overlap in time and frequency, and background noise can be intense. How can receivers make sense of the acoustic scene when there is so much noise and acoustic clutter? The answer is that vocal communication in such environments engages a suite of perceptual and cognitive mechanisms responsible for parsing the acoustic scene into perceptually discrete auditory “objects” or “streams” of behavioral relevance. In this chapter, I review psychophysical and neurophysiological studies of European starlings ( Sturnus vulgaris , Sturnidae ) that have aimed to identify mechanisms underlying the perceptual organization of complex acoustic scenes. The focus of this review is on recent efforts to discover neural mechanisms for auditory scene analysis (ASA) that promote signal detection (e.g., comodulation masking release and the comodulation detection difference), signal recognition (e.g., perceptual restoration), and signal segregation (e.g., auditory streaming ) under adverse listening conditions. The chapter emphasizes that key insights into the neural codes for ASA are to be gained by integrating neurophysiological approaches with objective measures of psychophysical performance in animal models for which receiving communication signals in a crowd is a key feature of their biology.