Dr Michael Reichert attended the 2016 meeting of the Animal Behaviour Society in Missouri, USA and gave a presentation on “Common Biases in Sound Localization in Insects and Anurans When Directional Cues Conflict”
“For effective acoustic communication, the location of origin of a sound must be determined. However, in natural environments this can be challenging because interference can sometimes result in conflicting cues for the direction of a sound’s location. How do animals integrate this conflicting information to decide from which direction a sound was coming from. In this presentation I discussed a series of experiments and computer models that address this question for acoustic signalling in the context of mate choice in grasshoppers and frogs. I found surprising similarities between the two groups in their biases towards time cues of a sound’s location. This was corroborated by a neural model of sound integration, which fit the behavioural data well.”
