Frogs Exploit Statistical Regularities in Noisy Acoustic Scenes to Solve Cocktail-Party-Like Problems

Abstract

This submission is a supplement to the paper entitled “ Frogs Exploit Statistical Regularities in Noisy Acoustic Scenes to Solve Cocktail-Party-Like Problems” by Lee et al. (2017) published in Current Biology. In this paper, we develop an auditory filterbank inspired by the frog peripheral auditory system to quantify the natural scene statistics of frog breeding choruses. We show that natural chorus noise exhibits a high-level of spectrotemporal correlation (comodulation) among frequencies emphasized in advertisement calls. In 4 psychophysical experiments, we demonstrate that treefrogs can exploit comodulation in background noise to mitigate noise-induced errors in evolutionary critical mate-choice decisions.Frogs experienced fewer errors in recognizing conspecific calls and in selecting calls of high-quality mates in the presence of comodulated noise. This submission includes an implementation of the frog auditory filterbank in Matlab, source data, and other Matlab code used in data analyses to generate the main and supplemental figures presented in Lee et al. (2017).