CAREER: The Receiver Psychology of Acoustic Communication Networks

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).In humans and other animals, acoustic communication often takes place in large social groups or "networks" comprising multiple signalers and receivers. In such environments, the background noise generated by simultaneously signaling individuals can impair or "mask" the perception of signals by intended receivers. Auditory masking, in turn, can lead to communication errors. In humans, such errors commonly lead to the misunderstanding of speech in noisy social settings. This project tests the hypothesis that receivers possess psychological mechanisms that function to ameliorate the negative impacts of masking noise by exploiting predictable features of the noise itself. This hypothesis will be tested using frog communication as a model. During their breeding season, male frogs aggregate in choruses and produce loud advertisement calls to attract females. The objectives of the project are to understand how female frogs exploit acoustic features of the noise of a chorus (i) to better recognize the mating calls of their own species, (ii) to discriminate among the calls of their own species and different species, and (iii) to discriminate between preferred and non-preferred males of their own species. The project integrates current paradigms in animal behavior and hearing research and could transform the way research on receiver psychology and communication networks informs the study of human hearing, speech perception, and auditory neuroscience. More broadly, the project will engage the public in the process of scientific inquiry and discovery through the development of a new multi-media exhibit on frogs at a natural history museum and the involvement of citizen scientists in the collection of raw data. The project will also enhance undergraduate and graduate education by developing new project-based learning exercises, a writing-enriched curriculum, and by training graduate students from multiple underrepresented groups in science.