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Development of responsiveness to suprathreshold acoustic stimulation in chickens
Insights
Young chickens show rapid auditory development in their first four days. Their distress call suppression to sounds changes with age, loudness, and pitch, indicating developing "perceived loudness" and "perceptual sharpening".
Area of Science:
- Animal Behavior
- Developmental Neuroscience
- Auditory Perception
Background:
- Auditory processing undergoes significant development in early life.
- Understanding early auditory perception is crucial for studying developmental changes in sensory systems.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate developmental changes in the unconditioned response to acoustic stimulation in young chickens.
- To measure distress call suppression durations in response to varying tone intensities and frequencies.
Main Methods:
- Measured distress call (peep) suppression durations in newly hatched and 4-day-old chicks.
- Assessed resuppression after a 6% frequency change in habituated tones.
- Analyzed data based on age, stimulus intensity, and frequency.
Main Results:
- Suppression duration increased with stimulus intensity.
- Responsiveness to high frequencies developed faster than to low frequencies.
- Resuppression duration increased with age, with longer suppression to maternal call frequencies.
Conclusions:
- Young chickens exhibit rapid developmental changes in auditory perception within the first four days of life.
- These changes reflect alterations in "perceived loudness" and "perceptual sharpening".
Abstract:
Developmental changes in an unconditioned response to acoustic stimulation were observed in young chickens. Specifically, durations of distress call (peep) suppression were measured after the onsets of tones that differed in intensity and frequency in 384 newly hatched and 4-day-old chicks. Resuppression was also measured after a 6% change in the frequency of these tones, once the animals had habituated to the original tone. The data showed that the suppression varied systematically as a function of age, intensity, and frequency: (a) the duration of suppression increased with increasing stimulus intensity, as expected; (b) responsiveness to high frequencies grew more rapidly over the first 4 days than responsiveness to low frequencies, an effect indicating a developmental gradient across frequencies with age; (c) resuppression to the 6% change in frequency increased in duration with age; and (d) young birds suppressed vocalizations longer to loud tones in the range of their species' maternal assembly call than to other frequency-intensity combinations. These developmental trends indicate rapid changes in "perceived loudness" and "perceptual sharpening" over the first few days of postnatal life.