Avoiding conflicts between the natural behavior of the animal and the demands of discrimination experiments

Auditory discrimination experiments are traditionally designed without regard for ethological or ecological concerns, yet land dwelling mammals may have specialized behavior with respect to sound sources. Auditory discriminations occur under field conditions, and there is some fit or matching of the animal's behavior to the acoustic environment. Understanding this fit requires a knowledge of specializations. Understanding the specializations may also guide the design of discrimination experiments. This paper reviews a number of auditory discrimination experiments that were designed to reveal some of the specialized behaviors. These experiments showed the following: (i) The position of a sound source is the dominant sensory dimension, over riding the quality of the sound; (ii) the effect of reinforcing a response in the presence of a sound is to strengthen the response of approaching the source. This effect is ubiquitous in discrimination tasks; (iii) sounds that are novel at the start of discrimination training more rapidly gain control of responding than sound to which the animal has been pre-exposed; (iv) novel low-intensity sounds elicit approach and exploration of the source. These behaviors rapidly adapt. These four behavioral attributes are considered in terms of their impact upon behavior in the field, and of the requirements they impose on the design of experimental discriminations.