Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Rat Behavioral Discrimination Of Temporal Cues In Species-Specific Vocalization, Kevin Mathews Tharakan

Honors Scholar Theses

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 …