Abstract
Young chickens will suppress their regular peeping when they hear a change in the frequency of pulsing pure tones. The duration of this peep suppression grows with increasing amounts of frequency change. Various adaptive tracking procedures can thus use this response to estimate frequency difference limens in neonatal chickens. These estimates in chickens as young as 4 days of age are close to others available in the literature from mature subjects. Despite large variability in the results from these “staircases,” frequency difference limens generally decrease by approximately one percent over the first 4 days of post-natal life. As expected from human studies, variability in this discrimination task is greater than previously reported in a comparable detection task [L. Gray and E. W. Rubel, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl 1 71, S31 (1983)]. In conclusion, there is a significant increase in responsiveness to small changes in the frequency of pure tones as animals mature over the first few post-natal days. [Work supported by NIH.]
Published Version
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