Dimensionally Specific Attention Capture in Birds Performing Auditory Streaming Task

Previous studies in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) have indicated that they experience attention capture in a qualitatively similar way to humans. Here, we apply a similar objective auditory streaming paradigm, using modified budgerigar vocalizations instead of ABAB-… patterned pure tones, in the sound sequences. The birds were trained to respond to deviants in the target stream while ignoring the distractors in the background stream. The background distractor could vary among five different categories and two different sequential positions, while the target deviants could randomly appear at five different sequential positions and vary among two different categories. We found that unpredictable background distractors could deteriorate birds' sensitivity to the target deviants. Compared to conditions where the background distractor appeared right before the target deviant, the attention capture effect decayed in conditions when the background distractor appeared earlier. In contrast to results from the same paradigm using pure tones, the results here are evidence for a faster recovery from attention capture using modified vocalization segments. We found that the temporally modulated background distractor captured birds' attention more and deteriorated birds' performance more than other categories of background distractor, as the temporally modulated target deviant enabled the birds to focus their attention toward the temporal modulation dimension. However, different from humans, birds have lower tolerances for suppressing the distractors from the same feature dimensions as the targets, which is evidenced by higher false alarm rates for the temporally modulated distractor than other distractors from different feature dimensions.