Effects of Noise on Sound Perception in Marine Mammals
For marine mammals, auditory perception plays a critical role in a variety of acoustically mediated behaviors, such as communication, foraging, social interactions, and avoidance of predators. Although auditory perception involves many other factors beyon
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Effects of Noise on Sound Perception in Marine Mammals James J. Finneran and Brian K. Branstetter
Abstract For marine mammals, auditory perception plays a critical role in a variety of acoustically mediated behaviors, such as communication, foraging, social interactions, and avoidance of predators. Although auditory perception involves many other factors beyond merely hearing or detecting sounds, sound detection is a required element for perception. As with many other processes, sound detection may be adversely affected by the presence of noise. This chapter focuses on two of the most common manifestations of the effects of noise on sound detection: auditory masking and noise-induced threshold shifts. The current state of knowledge regarding auditory masking and noise-induced threshold shifts in marine mammals is reviewed, and perceptual consequences of masking and threshold shifts are discussed.
10.1 Introduction Auditory perception may be defined as the ability to detect, interpret, and attach meaning to sounds. For marine mammals, auditory perception plays a critical role in a variety of acoustically mediated behaviors, such as communication, foraging, social interactions, and avoidance of predators. Auditory perception can play an important role in detecting objects in the environment, discriminating between objects, and identifying the location of objects. Auditory perception is also a key component in auditory scene analysis—i.e., segregating a mixture of sounds from
J. J. Finneran (&) US Navy Marine Mammal Program, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, 53560 Hull St, San Diego, CA 92152, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. K. Branstetter National Marine Mammal Foundation, 2240 Shelter Island Dr, San Diego, CA 92106, USA
H. Brumm (ed.), Animal Communication and Noise, Animal Signals and Communication 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-41494-7_10, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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J. J. Finneran and B. K. Branstetter
a complex natural environment into ‘‘auditory streams’’ produced from individual sources and attending to those streams of interest (Bregman 1990). Although perception involves many other factors beyond merely hearing or detecting sounds, sound detection is a required element for perception. As with many other processes, sound detection may be adversely affected by the presence of noise. Because auditory perception plays a key role in so many vital tasks, noise that adversely affects sound perception could ultimately result in fitness consequences to the individual. This chapter focuses on two of the most common manifestations of the effects of noise on sound detection: auditory masking and noise-induced threshold shifts. Masking can be described as a reduction in the ability to hear a sound caused by the presence of another sound. A noise-induced threshold shift is a reduction in auditory sensitivity following a noise exposure. Both masking and threshold shifts have the effect of reducing an animal’s auditory sensitivity over some frequency bandwidth, with the key dist
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