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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“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
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Items 201–208 of 208
Regularity of spectral pattern and its effects on the perceptual fusion of harmonics
Roberts, B., & Bailey, P. J. (1996) · Perception & Psychophysics · doi:10.3758/bf03211882 · Cited by 16
Jensen, K. K. (2007) · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · doi:10.1121/1.2434246 · Cited by 12
Comodulation masking release in consonant recognition
Kwon, B. J. (2002) · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · doi:10.1121/1.1490351 · Cited by 11
SIGNAL DETECTION ENHANCED BY COMODULATED NOISE
Buschermöhle, M., Feudel, U., Klump, G. M., Bee, M. A., & Freund, J. A. (2006) · Fluctuation and Noise Letters · doi:10.1142/s0219477506003483 · Cited by 8
Self-citationFROM GIBSON'S FIRE TO GESTALTS A BRIDGE-BUILDING THEORY OF PERCEPTUAL OBJECTHOOD
Valkenburg, D. V., & Kubovy, M. (2004) · UWA Profiles and Research Repository (UWA) · Cited by 7
Evolutionary Adaptations for Auditory Communication
Klump, G. M. (2005) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/3-540-27437-5_2 · Cited by 4
Izumi, A. (2001) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 4
Goense, J. B. (2004) · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · Cited by 4
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 7
- Beecher MD Hepper PG Successes and failures of parent-offspring recognition systems in animals. Kin Recognition 1991 94 124 Cambridge University Press Cambridge
- Darwin CJ Carlyon RP Moore BCJ Auditory grouping. Hearing 1995 387 424 Academic Press New York
- Kroodsma DE Miller EH Ecology and Evolution of Acoustic Communication in Birds 1996 Cornell University Press Ithaca, NY
- Naguib M McGregor PK Singing interactions in songbirds. Animal Communication Networks 2005 300 319 Cambridge University Press Cambridge
- Nelken I Jacobson G Ahdut L Ulanovsky N Neural correlates of comodulation masking release in auditory cortex of cats. European Journal of Neuroscience 2000 12 495 495
- Tsuzaki M Takeshima C Irino T Patterson RD Kollmeier B Klump GM Hohmann V Langemann U Mauermann M Uppenkamp S Verhey JL Auditory stream segregation based on speaker size, and identification of size-modulated vowels. Hearing - From Basic Research to Applications 2007 Springer Berlin in press
- Wang D Brown GJ Computational Auditory Scene Analysis: Principles, Algorithms, and Applications 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hoboken, NJ
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Selective cortical representation of attended speaker in multi-talker speech perception
Mesgarani, N., & Chang, E. F. (2012) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature11020 · Cited by 1,012
Advances in the Study of Behavior
(2016) · Advances in the study of behavior · doi:10.1016/s0065-3454(16)30011-0 · Cited by 614
Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video
Grauman, K., Westbury, A., Byrne, E., Chavis, Z., Furnari, A., Girdhar, R., Hamburger, J., Jiang, H., Liu, M., Liu, X., et al. (2022) · 2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr52688.2022.01842 · Cited by 630
Temporal coherence and attention in auditory scene analysis
Shamma, S., Elhilali, M., & Micheyl, C. (2011) · Trends in Neurosciences · doi:10.1016/j.tins.2010.11.002 · Cited by 455
Self-citationSound Texture Perception via Statistics of the Auditory Periphery: Evidence from Sound Synthesis
McDermott, J. H., & Simoncelli, E. P. (2011) · Neuron · doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2011.06.032 · Cited by 426
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
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
