Data supporting "Informational Masking Constrains Vocal Communication in Nonhuman Animals"

Abstract

Noisy social environments constrain human speech communication in two important ways: spectrotemporal overlap between signals and noise can reduce speech audibility (“energetic masking”) and noise can also interfere with processing the informative features of otherwise audible speech (“informational masking”). To date, informational masking has not been investigated in studies of vocal communication in nonhuman animals, even though many animals make evolutionarily consequential decisions that depend on processing vocal information in noisy social environments. In this study of a treefrog, in which females choose mates in noisy breeding choruses, we investigated whether informational masking disrupts the processing of vocal information in the contexts of species recognition and sexual selection. The associated data for this work is being released prior to the publication of the manuscript for peer review.