This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University have discovered that humans and songbirds use markedly different strategies to recognize sequences of complex sounds. The findings shed new light on how biology and experience shape the way we perceive complex sounds, with implications for music and speech.
When people hear a familiar melody, they generally follow its pitch pattern (how high or low a sound is), even when it is played on another instrument. But do songbirds recognize sound patterns in the same way? A new study by researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University suggests that they do not.
Using a listening task in which humans and zebra finches were exposed to the same artificial sounds, the researchers found that humans attend predominantly to pitch, whereas zebra finches combine pitch with changes in the spectral structure—or formants—of these sounds. The study is published in Communications Biology. "These findings show that vocal-learning species (such as humans and zebra finches) do not necessarily organize the same sounds in the same way," states corresponding author professor Henkjan Honing, director of the Music Cognition Group at the University of Amsterdam.
"How we recognize complex sounds seems to depend on two things working together: species-specific auditory predispositions and what experience has taught us to pay attention to." The researchers trained humans and zebra finches to distinguish sequences of five harmonic tones. They then presented modified versions of these sequences in which the pitch contour, formant contour or both had been selectively changed. The results revealed a clear difference.
Zebra finches treated pitch and formant trajectories as complementary components of the sound pattern. Either dimension could support recognition when the other was made less informative. Human listeners, by contrast, based their judgments primarily on pitch whenever pitch information was available.
Changes to the formant pattern had relatively little influence on how they classified the sequences. "Our findings show that humans and zebra finches can both use information about changes in pitch and spectral structure," says co-author Dr. Zhi-Yuan Ning (at the time of this study working at the Institute of Biology Leiden of Leiden University).
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