[Sib_seminars] SEMINAR THUR DEC 9 10:00 B102 CLSL

[Debbie Lanter]

*Thursday, December 9

SIB - VERTEBRATE ECOLOGICAL PHYSIOLOGIST SEARCH CANDIDATE
10:00 AM - B 102 CLSL
"Acoustic Communication in Multi-source Social Environments"
Mark Allen Bee, University of Minnesota

Abstract
*

Humans and other animals often communicate using acoustic signals in 
large or dense social groups comprising multiple sound sources (e.g., a 
crowded restaurant, a breeding colony, a communal roost, or a chorus). 
In these multi-source social environments, receivers experience greater 
difficulty hearing signals of interest due to the auditory masking and 
acoustic interference produced by high background noise levels and the 
overlapping signals of other nearby individuals. This so-called 
"cocktail party problem" is of widespread interest, in part, because 
prosthetic hearing devices for hearing-impaired humans and computer 
algorithms for automated speech recognition often perform poorly under 
multi-source listening conditions when compared to healthy human 
auditory systems. While there is a vast literature on these topics 
pertaining to human hearing and speech communication, surprisingly few 
studies have investigated how nonhuman animals may be adapted to solve 
similar communication problems. In this talk, I will describe ongoing 
work in my lab aimed at testing hypotheses about behavioral and 
perceptual mechanism that allow gray treefrogs (/Hyla chrysoscelis/) to 
communicate in noisy breeding choruses. After outlining several 
functional constraints posed by communicating in a chorus, I will report 
results from recent behavioral experiments aimed at uncovering how 
receivers may be adapted to cope with these constraints. Throughout the 
talk, I will attempt to illustrate how broad-scale, comparative studies 
of humans and other animals may ultimately reveal an evolutionary 
diversity of underlying mechanisms for solving cocktail-party-like 
problems of communication.


-- 

Debbie Lanter
Office Administrator
University of Illinois
School of Integrative Biology
286 Morrill Hall, MC-120
505 S. Goodwin Avenue
Urbana IL 61801
telephone (217) 333-3044
fax (217) 244-1224
dlanter at life.illinois.edu

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