The “Cocktail Party Problem”: What Is It? How Can It Be Solved? And Why Should Animal Behaviorists Study It?

By M. Bee, Christophe Micheyl. 2008

347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Animals often use acoustic signals to communicate in groups or social aggregations in which multiple individuals signal within a receiver's hearing range. Consequently, receivers face challenges related to acoustic interference and auditory masking that are not unlike the human “cocktail party problem,” which refers to the problem of perceiving speech in noisy social settings. Understanding the sensory solutions to the cocktail party problem has been a goal of research on human hearing and speech communication for several decades. Despite a general interest in acoustic signaling in groups, animal behaviorists have devoted comparatively less attention toward understanding how animals solve problems equivalent to the human cocktail party problem. After illustrating how humans and non-human animals experience and overcome similar perceptual challenges in cocktail-party-like social environments, this article reviews previous psychophysical and physiological studies of humans and non-human animals to describe how the cocktail party problem can be solved. This review also outlines several basic and applied benefits that could result from studies of the cocktail party problem in the context of animal acoustic communication.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Small Animals, Speech & Audio, Cognitive Science & Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental Biology

1. Heiner Römer
2. Klaus Riede
3. Arne K. D. Schmidt
4. H. Brumm
5. David A. Luther
6. S. Zollinger
7. A. Horn
8. M. Leonard

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. Heiner Römer
2. Klaus Riede
3. Arne K. D. Schmidt
4. H. Brumm
5. David A. Luther
6. S. Zollinger
7. M. Leonard
8. A. Horn

In Small Animals

1. H. Brumm

In Speech & Audio

1. H. Brumm

In Cognitive Science & Psychology

1. H. Brumm

Citations in the corpus

• Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video (2021, neutral): “[17] Mark A Bee and Christophe Micheyl.”
• Spectral niche segregation and community organization in a tropical cricket assemblage (2013, background): “Auditory masking as a result of this situation will decrease the discrimination and/or detection of behaviorally relevant signals, depending on the degree of signal (spectral) overlap (Riede 1997; Wollerman and Wiley 2002; Brumm and Slabbekoorn 2005; Bee 2007; Bee and Micheyl 2008; Schmidt and Römer”
• Animal Communication and Noise (2013, background): “2), sound pattern recognition (Gerhardt and Huber 2002), source localization (Christensen-Dalsgaard 2005), and noise (Brumm and Slabbekoorn 2005) have featured prominently in studies of animal acoustic communication, this is less so for auditory scene analysis (Hulse 2002; Bee and Micheyl 2008).”