From:
Sukie Crandall
Date: 2010-03-26 04:42:13 UTC
Subject: [ferrethealth] abstracts
To: fhl <ferrethealth@yahoogroups.com>
Anyone who has ever played games with ferrets that are initiated with
questions already knew that they can do this:
> J Acoust Soc Am. 2010 Mar;127(3):1673.
> Do ferrets perceive relative pitch?
> Yin P, Fritz JB, Shamma SA.
> Neural Systems Laboratory, Institute for Systems Research,
> University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742.
> The existence of relative pitch perception in animals is difficult
> to demonstrate, since unlike humans, animals often attend to
> absolute rather than relative properties of sound elements. However,
> the results of the present study show that ferrets can be trained
> using relative pitch to discriminate two-tone sequences (rising vs.
> falling). Three ferrets were trained using a positive-reinforcement
> paradigm in which sequences of reference (one to five repeats) and
> target stimuli were presented, and animals were rewarded only when
> responding correctly to the target. The training procedure consisted
> of three training phases that successively shaped the ferrets to
> attend to relative pitch. In Phase-1 training, animals learned the
> basic task with sequences of invariant tone-pairs and could use
> absolute pitch information. During Phase-2 training, in order to
> emphasize relative cues, absolute pitch was varied each trial within
> a two-octave frequency range. In Phase-3 training, absolute pitch
> cues were removed, and only relative cue information was available
> to solve the task. Two ferrets successfully completed training on
> all three phases and achieved significant discriminative performance
> over the trained four-octave frequency range. These results suggest
> that ferrets can be trained to discern the relative pitch
> relationship of a sequence of tone-pairs independent of frequency.
> PMID: 20329865
---
> J Acoust Soc Am. 2010 Mar;127(3):2029.
> Intention and attention: Top-down influences on the representation
> of task-relevant sounds.
> Fritz JB, David SV, Winkowski D, Yin P, Elhilali M, Shamma SA.
> Inst. for Systems Res., ECE, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD
> 20747, ripple@isr.umd.eduUniv. of Maryland, College Park, MD
> 20747Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD 21218Univ. of Maryland,
> College Park, MD 20747.
> To explore the role of top-down projections from frontal cortex (FC)
> to auditory cortex (AC), which may play a role in adaptive reshaping
> of A1 receptive fields to attended acoustic stimuli during behavior,
> simultaneous recordings were made from single neurons in FC and AC
> in behaving ferrets, trained on multiple auditory detection and
> discrimination tasks in positive and negative reinforcement
> paradigms. Performance required selective attention to different
> salient spectral frequency andor temporal cues. Previous
> observations revealed task-specific transformations in receptive
> fields in AC [Fritz et al. (2003); (2005); (2007); (2009); Atiani et
> al. (2009)]. In contrast, FC neurons showed recognition responses,
> which categorically distinguished between acoustic foreground and
> background stimuli. FC responses to targets were often independent
> of the acoustic properties of the target and thus encoded an
> abstract representation of the class of target stimuli [Fritz et al.
> (2009)]. Stimulation of FC, paired with tones, lead to receptive
> field transformations similar to those observed in behavior. These
> results emphasize the importance of interactions between multiple
> areas during selective attention, and the tight coupling of target
> recognition and auditory attention that enhances auditory cortical
> filters for attended acoustic stimuli, thus creating a functional
> representation of task-salient sounds during behavior. [This work
> was supported by grants from NIDCD, NIH.].
> PMID: 20331205
[Negative Reinforcement means the ending or avoidance of something
unpleasant through a behavioral change, for instance, if you are
normally someone who speeds but find that you are ticketed less when
you don't, so you modify your behavior to avoid the tickets then that
is negative reinforcement. The tickets are not the negative
reinforcement; figuring out that you can modify your speed to avoid
them is. The tickets are punishment which is an entirely different
concept.]
Sukie (not a vet)
Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
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)
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