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Across-species differences in pitch perception are consistent with differences in cochlear filtering

Author(s)
Walker, Kerry MM; Gonzalez, Ray; Kang, Joe Z; McDermott, Joshua Hartman; King, Andrew J
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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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.
Date issued
2019-03
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129762
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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
ISSN
2050-084X

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