The DOI matches its Crossref record; 208 of the 208 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The cocktail party problem: What is it? How can it be solved? And why should animal behaviorists study it?
Open accessAbstract
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 nonhuman animals experience and overcome similar perceptual challenges in cocktail-party-like social environments, this article reviews previous psychophysical and physiological studies of humans and nonhuman 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.
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“real ecosystems are messy “cocktail-party” environments (Bee and Micheyl 2008), full of overlapping calls, echoes, and background noise.”
From Listening forward: emerging roles of bioacoustics in ecology, evolution, and conservation (2026) · cites this paper as Bee and Micheyl 2008
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“Speech enhancement can be used to suppress background noise, while speech separation aims to separate target speech from a speech mixture known as the ‘‘cocktail party’’ problem (Cherry, 1953; Arons, 1992; Haykin and Chen, 2005; Bee and Micheyl, 2008).”
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“A central aim of studies that describe anuran vocal repertoire is to identify sources of signal variation and their potential for individual discrimination ( Bee & Gerhardt, 2001 ; Bee, 2004 ; Bee & Micheyl, 2008 ; Feng et al., 2009 ; Tanner & Bee, 2019 ).”
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“ICA is used in different areas, notably in speech-related studies, from which comes the cocktail party problem 5 .”
Metadata
- Authors
- Bee, M. A., & Micheyl, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Minnesota (US)
- ORCID
- Bee, Mark A.
- Venue
- Journal of Comparative Psychology
- Published
- 2008
- Volume
- 122
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 235-251
- ISSN
- 0093-4127 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-2087
- 0735-7036
- PMC
- PMC2692487
- OpenAlex
- W2047527596
- Cited by
- 347
- References
- 208
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 24 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 17 · 2020: 24 · 2019: 26 · 2018: 21 · 2017: 18 · 2016: 19 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 22 · 2013: 32 · 2012: 18
- FWCI
- 11.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Journal of comparative psychology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (R03DC008396; R01DC07657)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Music Perception
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Marine animal studies overview
- Keywords
- cocktail party problem, auditory masking, acoustic interference, speech perception in noise, social signaling, auditory scene analysis, animal hearing
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Animal Communication, Behavior, Animal, Behaviorism, Cues, Humans, Perceptual Masking, Sound Spectrography, Space Perception, Time Factors
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