Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition
Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1515380113
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发表时间：
2016-02-09
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Gentner, Timothy Q.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bregman, Micah R.;Patel, Aniruddh D.;Gentner, Timothy Q.
人类很容易识别出以对数频率向上或向下移动的“变调”音乐旋律。令人惊讶的是，鸣禽似乎缺乏这种能力，尽管它们可以学习识别人类旋律并使用复杂的声音序列进行交流。经过数十年的研究，人们普遍认为鸣禽与人类不同，在旋律识别中强烈偏向使用绝对音高 (AP)。这项工作几乎完全依赖于声学上简单的刺激，这可能掩盖了对更复杂的频谱特征的敏感性。在这里，我们使用音高和音色不同的音调序列研究了一种鸣禽——欧洲椋鸟（Sturnus vulgaris）的旋律识别。我们发现，独立改变音高或音色的小操作可以驱动旋律识别的机会，这表明这两种感知都不能很好地描述鸟类用于这项任务的感知线索。相反，我们表明，即使在没有音高的情况下，只要保留组成音调的频谱形状，旋律识别也可以概括。这些结果挑战了关于在非人类听觉序列识别中使用音调线索的传统观点。
Humans easily recognize "transposed" musical melodies shifted up or down in log frequency. Surprisingly, songbirds seem to lack this capacity, although they can learn to recognize human melodies and use complex acoustic sequences for communication. Decades of research have led to the widespread belief that songbirds, unlike humans, are strongly biased to use absolute pitch (AP) in melody recognition. This work relies almost exclusively on acoustically simple stimuli that may belie sensitivities to more complex spectral features. Here, we investigate melody recognition in a species of songbird, the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris), using tone sequences that vary in both pitch and timbre. We find that small manipulations altering either pitch or timbre independently can drive melody recognition to chance, suggesting that both percepts are poor descriptors of the perceptual cues used by birds for this task. Instead we show that melody recognition can generalize even in the absence of pitch, as long as the spectral shapes of the constituent tones are preserved. These results challenge conventional views regarding the use of pitch cues in nonhuman auditory sequence recognition.