A computational model of the bottlenose dolphin sonar: Feature-extracting method
A process of echo‐image formation in bottlenose dolphin perception was investigated in our experiments, in which animals were trained to differentiate passive actual echoes recorded beforehand purposely, as well as echo‐like simulated impulses. The results suggest that dolphin, processing echoes within critical interval of time (∼0.2 ms), utilizes the string of three independent, hierarchically organized features (echoes subjective characteristics) being defined by different scales of spectral density oscillation, and energy. Herewith, dolphin is capable to assess features average value over a series of echoes. Distinguishing stimuli, dolphin estimates successively features values from senior to minor, terminating the process at the feature, which contains detectable differences in compared stimuli (the distinctive feature). A procedure of subsequent identification of the reference stimulus can be described by the following decision rule: If the dolphin utilizes some feature as the distinctive one, then i...
Discrimination of complex synthetic echoes by an echolocating bottlenose dolphin.
Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) detect and discriminate underwater objects by interrogating the environment with their native echolocation capabilities. Study of dolphins' ability to detect complex (multihighlight) signals in noise suggest echolocation object detection using an approximate 265-micros energy integration time window sensitive to the echo region of highest energy or containing the highlight with highest energy. Backscatter from many real objects contains multiple highlights, distributed over multiple integration windows and with varying amplitude relationships. This study used synthetic echoes with complex highlight structures to test whether high-amplitude initial highlights would interfere with discrimination of low-amplitude trailing highlights. A dolphin was trained to discriminate two-highlight synthetic echoes using differences in the center frequencies of the second highlights. The energy ratio (delta dB) and the timing relationship (delta T) between the first and second highlights were manipulated. An iso-sensitivity function was derived using a factorial design testing delta dB at -10, -15, -20, and -25 dB and delta T at 10, 20, 40, and 80 micros. The results suggest that the animal processed multiple echo highlights as separable analyzable features in the discrimination task, perhaps perceived through differences in spectral rippling across the duration of the echoes.
Mechanisms of Signal Discrimination and Identification in the Auditory System of Tursiops Truncatus
Discrimination and identification of acoustic signals in the human and animal auditory system are performed by means of feature extraction and analysis (Chistovich et al., 1976; Bibikov, 1978). Our first observations showed that dolphins also use features for signal discrimination (Dubrovsky and Titov, 1978; Dubrovsky and Zorikov, 1983).