Spatial hearing ability of the pigmented Guinea pig (Cavia porcellus): Minimum audible angle and spatial release from masking in azimuth

Hearing Research
Nathaniel T GreeneDaniel J Tollin

Abstract

Despite the common use of guinea pigs in investigations of the neural mechanisms of binaural and spatial hearing, their behavioral capabilities in spatial hearing tasks have surprisingly not been thoroughly investigated. To begin to fill this void, we tested the spatial hearing of adult male guinea pigs in several experiments using a paradigm based on the prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle response. In the first experiment, we presented continuous broadband noise from one speaker location and switched to a second speaker location (the "prepulse") along the azimuth prior to presenting a brief, ∼110 dB SPL startle-eliciting stimulus. We found that the startle response amplitude was systematically reduced for larger changes in speaker swap angle (i.e., greater PPI), indicating that using the speaker "swap" paradigm is sufficient to assess stimulus detection of spatially separated sounds. In a second set of experiments, we swapped low- and high-pass noise across the midline to estimate their ability to utilize interaural time- and level-difference cues, respectively. The results reveal that guinea pigs can utilize both binaural cues to discriminate azimuthal sound sources. A third set of experiments examined spatial ...Continue Reading

Citations

Aug 14, 2019·Nature Neuroscience·Jose L Pardo-VazquezAlfonso Renart
Jun 4, 2019·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·Kongyan LiJan W H Schnupp

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