Humans can perceive a regular psychological pulse in music known as the beat. The evolutionary origins and neural mechanisms underlying this ability are hypothetically linked to imitative vocal learning, a rare trait found only in some species of mammals and birds. Beat perception has been demonstrated in vocal learning parrots but not in songbirds. We trained European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) on two sound discriminations to investigate their perception of the beat and temporal structure in rhythmic patterns. First, we trained birds on a two-choice discrimination between rhythmic patterns of tones that contain or lack a regular beat. Despite receiving extensive feedback, the starlings were unable to distinguish the first two patterns. Next, we probed the temporal cues that starlings use for discriminating rhythms in general. We trained birds to discriminate a baseline set of isochronous and triplet tone sequences. On occasional probe trials, we presented transformations of the baseline patterns. The starlings' responses to the probes suggest they relied on absolute temporal features to sort the sounds into “fast” and “slow” and otherwise ignored patterns that were present. Our results support that starlings attend to local features in rhythms and are less sensitive to the global temporal organization.
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April 2021
April 12 2021
European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) discriminate rhythms by rate, not temporal patterns
Brendon Samuels
;
Brendon Samuels
a)
1
Brain and Mind Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario
, 1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario, N6A 5K7, Canada
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Jessica Grahn;
Jessica Grahn
1
Brain and Mind Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario
, 1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario, N6A 5K7, Canada
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Molly J. Henry;
Molly J. Henry
1
Brain and Mind Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario
, 1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario, N6A 5K7, Canada
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Scott A. MacDougall-Shackleton
Scott A. MacDougall-Shackleton
2
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario
, London, N6A 5K7, Canada
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a)
Electronic mail: [email protected], ORCID: 0000-0001-9026-9617.
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 149, 2546–2558 (2021)
Article history
Received:
October 22 2020
Accepted:
March 17 2021
Citation
Brendon Samuels, Jessica Grahn, Molly J. Henry, Scott A. MacDougall-Shackleton; European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) discriminate rhythms by rate, not temporal patterns. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 April 2021; 149 (4): 2546–2558. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0004215
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