Date of Completion
Spring 5-1-2016
Thesis Advisor(s)
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Honors Major
Biological Sciences
Disciplines
Medicine and Health Sciences | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
Current behavioral and neurophysiologic studies propose that many animals can detect and discriminate the invariant statistics found in natural vocalization (Geffen et. al., 2011; Rodriguez et al., 2010). However, according to current research the neuronal mechanisms underlying the sound discrimination process is still unclear. While numerous auditory statistics have been manipulated, none has varied the temporal and tonal frequency cues independently in their synthetic call sequences, thus it is still uncertain whether rats rely on temporal cues in the sound envelope for communication.
The aim of this research is to determine whether or not rats rely on temporal cues in the sound envelope for call recognition and communication, as humans do similarly during speech perception. Studying the behavior and neural recordings related to sound and speech recognition can aid in the generating a biologically accurate computational model to further medical research of cortical response and pathways of sound and speech recognition.
Recommended Citation
Mathews Tharakan, Kevin, "Rat Behavioral Discrimination of Temporal Cues in Species-Specific Vocalization" (2016). Honors Scholar Theses. 513.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses/513