Presentation Details
Quiet the noise: Signal detection in noise varies among urban and rural soundscapes.

Alejandro Velez1, 2, Carolyn Schwartz3, Tarah Haslett3.

1University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA.2Collaborative for Animal Behavior (CoLAB), Knoxville, TN, USA.3San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

Abstract


The world is inherently noisy and, over the last century, urban expansion has led to a drastic increase in human-generated noise. Several studies have shown how vocal signals change in response to increasing levels of anthropogenic noise. Recent reviews propose that the major gap in the field is our lack of understanding of how sensory-processing mechanisms, particularly the ability to extract signals from noise, are changing in urban soundscapes. In this study of Pacific treefrogs (Pseudacris regilla), we asked whether the ability to detect signals in noise varies among populations exposed to different levels of natural and anthropogenic noise. We recorded auditory brainstem responses for tones between 0.4 and 5.0 kHz in the presence of broadband noise broadcast at two levels. Overall, subjects from sites with high levels of ambient noise had higher masked thresholds and critical ratios at frequencies below 1.0 kHz, but showed less amount of masking between 1.6 and 2.5 kHz. Together, our results suggest that hearing differences associated with ambient noise levels improve the signal-to-noise ratio by filtering out noise in a frequency region important for communication.

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