Across-species differences in pitch perception are consistent with differences in cochlear filtering
Name
elife-41626-v2.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.41 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4649a0c12eef4d177b2e997168e8be77
Author(s)
Walker, Kerry MM
Gonzalez, Ray
Kang, Joe Z
McDermott, Joshua Hartman
King, Andrew J
Date Issued
March 2019
Journal
eLife
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Citation
Walker, Kerry MM et al. "Across-species differences in pitch perception are consistent with differences in cochlear filtering." eLife 8 (March 2019): e41626 © 2018 Walker et al.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Pitch perception is critical for recognizing speech, music and animal vocalizations, but its neurobiological basis remains unsettled, in part because of divergent results across species. We investigated whether species-specific differences exist in the cues used to perceive pitch and whether these can be accounted for by differences in the auditory periphery. Ferrets accurately generalized pitch discriminations to untrained stimuli whenever temporal envelope cues were robust in the probe sounds, but not when resolved harmonics were the main available cue. By contrast, human listeners exhibited the opposite pattern of results on an analogous task, consistent with previous studies. Simulated cochlear responses in the two species suggest that differences in the relative salience of the two pitch cues can be attributed to differences in cochlear filter bandwidths. The results support the view that cross-species variation in pitch perception reflects the constraints of estimating a sound’s fundamental frequency given species-specific cochlear tuning.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.41626
