Abstract:

Psychophysical experiments have helped define the sense of hearing of goldfish with respect to detection and discrimination thresholds within many acoustic dimensions. Generally, these data reveal aspects of peripheral and early brain processing that are qualitatively, and sometimes quantitatively, indistinguishable from those of most other vertebrates. This correspondence suggests that goldfish share an essentially common sense of hearing with other vertebrates, and motivated new experiments that investigate more complex aspects of sound perception in goldfish using the phenomenon of stimulus generalization to study perceived similarities among simple and complex sounds. We have found that goldfish listen analytically to simultaneous tones, have perceptual dimensions analogous to pitch, timbre, and roughness in human listeners, and can segregate simultaneous, complex sources in perception. Several of these processes will be illustrated. These results are in accord with the hypothesis that the sense of hearing in goldfish is essentially similar to that revealed in other vertebrates studied. We suggest that it is useful to view the sense of hearing of any given vertebrate species as representing a general vertebrate pattern as an alternative to assuming that individual species are specially adapted to process particular sounds in its species-specific niche. [Work supported by NIH, NIDCD.]