Abstract: J Acoust Soc Am. 2013 Jan;133(1):365-76. doi: 10.1121/1.4768798. Spectral timbre perception in ferrets: Discrimination of artificial vowels under different listening conditions. Bizley JK, Walker KM, King AJ, Schnupp JW. Source Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PT, United Kingdom. Abstract Spectral timbre is an acoustic feature that enables human listeners to determine the identity of a spoken vowel. Despite its importance to sound perception, little is known about the neural representation of sound timbre and few psychophysical studies have investigated timbre discrimination in non-human species. In this study, ferrets were positively conditioned to discriminate artificial vowel sounds in a two-alternative-forced-choice paradigm. Animals quickly learned to discriminate the vowel sound /u/ from /[lower epsilon]/ and were immediately able to generalize across a range of voice pitches. They were further tested in a series of experiments designed to assess how well they could discriminate these vowel sounds under different listening conditions. First, a series of morphed vowels was created by systematically shifting the location of the first and second formant frequencies. Second, the ferretswere tested with single formant stimuli designed to assess which spectral cues they could be using to make their decisions. Finally, vowel discrimination thresholds were derived in the presence of noise maskers presented from either the same or a different spatial location. These data indicate that ferretsshow robust vowel discrimination behavior across a range of listening conditions and that this ability shares many similarities with human listeners. PMID: 23297909 [PubMed - in process] End quote. We actually find hearing ferrets to be very good at coming to understand speech, too, as long as there is consistent repetition of words in context, reward involved, and the sentence structure is simple, though we have had some whose behavior indicated understanding of conditionals. An example of conditionals was when we knew that kit, Warp, had fallen asleep somewhere but did not know where. Steve repeated to Meltdown a number of times, "Meltdown get Warp, then Meltdown get treat." and when she looked like may be she had gotten it he put her down. She ran under our platform bed, emerged dragging our Warp by the scruff, deposited Warp on Steve's foot, and then looked up at Steve and licked her chops. Ferrets are descended from animals with activity that is mostly crepuscular (low light conditions of dawn and dusk) and also much activity in dark burrows for living and hunting -- so like smell and touch, the processing of sounds had to be very important and being able to tell differences in the sounds and complex sound patterns of den mates, multiple types of prey, and some predators who might join the polecats below ground all would affect polecat survivability. Ninety-nine results results come up with the search term ferret sound http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=ferret%20sound and 57 come up with ferret hearing http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=ferret%20hearing Sukie (not a vet) Ferrets make the world a game. Recommended ferret health links: http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/ http://ferrethealth.org/archive/ http://www.miamiferret.org/ http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/ http://www.ferretcongress.org/ http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html all ferret topics: http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/archives/ferret-search.html "All hail the procrastinators for they shall rule the world tomorrow." (2010, Steve Crandall) A nation is as free as the least within it. [Posted in FML 7667]