ECHO SUPPRESSION IN BUDGERIGARS

拟议研究的总体目标是继续调查虎皮鹦鹉（Melopsittacus undulatus）在复杂环境中的听力，这是一种小型澳大利亚鹦鹉，并将小型鸟类的这些结果与人类和其他动物的结果进行比较。 关于虎皮鹦鹉的听觉，我们已经知道得很多了，这使它们成为用于回声抑制实验的优秀物种。 虽然他们的声音定位能力并不显着，他们表现出大量的自由场双耳解蔽，它最近被发现，他们有更好的时间分辨率在精细结构的歧视任务比人类。 在这里，操作性条件反射和心理声学的方法将被用来测量鹦鹉回声抑制。 在一系列实验中，两个具有方位角分离的扬声器将各自呈现咔嗒声。声音将被延迟一个设定的量，延迟将随着每次实验而变化。 虎皮鹦鹉仍然报告为一次点击的两次点击之间的最小延迟量将是优先效应和求和定位测量。 回声阈值是两个扬声器之间的延迟，在此期间虎皮鹦鹉报告两个不同的点击。这些实验帮助我们了解这些小鸟如何在复杂的自然环境中处理回声。

The overall goal of the proposed research is to continue the investigation of hearing in complex environments in the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus), a small Australian parrot, and to compare these results from small birds to those found in humans and other animals. Much is already known about hearing in the budgerigar, which makes them an excellent species to use in experiments on echo suppression. Although their sound localization capabilities are not remarkable, they exhibit a large amount of free-field binaural unmasking and it has recently been discovered that they have much better temporal resolution in fine structure discrimination tasks than humans. Here, operant conditioning and psychoacoustic methods will be used to measure echo suppression in budgerigars. In a series of experiments, two speakers with an azimuthal separation will each present a click. The sounds will be delayed by a set amount, and the delay will change with each experiment. The smallest amount of delay between the two clicks that the budgerigars still report as one click will be the precedence effect and summing localization measurements. The echo threshold is the delay between the two speakers at which the budgerigars report two distinct clicks. These experiments help us understand how these small birds deal with echoes in their complex natural environments.