title: Behavioral evidence for auditory induction in a species of rodent: Mongolian gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus).
abstract: When a segment of sound of interest is interrupted by a loud extraneous noise, humans perceive that the missing sound continues during the intrusive noise. This restoration of auditory information occurs in perceptions of both speech and non-speech sounds (e.g., tone bursts), a phenomenon referred to as auditory induction. In this study, Mongolian gerbils were trained with standard Go/No-Go operant conditioning to discriminate continuous tone bursts (the Go stimulus) from tone bursts with a silent gap in the middle (the No-Go stimulus). Noise was added to Go and No-Go stimuli to determine the condition under which induction would occur. The Mongolian gerbils engaged in Go responses to No-Go stimuli only when the noise spectrally surrounding the tone was of the same duration as the silent portion of the No-Go stimulus; these results match those previously reported in primates (humans and macaque monkeys). The result presents not only the evidence of the auditory induction in a rodent species but also suggests that similar mechanisms for restoring missing sounds are shared among mammals. Additionally, our findings demonstrated that the rodent can serve as a valuable animal model for future studies of perceptual restoration.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Information, Faculty of Life and Medical Sciences, Doshisha University, 1-3 Miyakodani, Tatara, Kyotanabe-city, Kyoto, 610-0321, Japan.
authors.forename: Kohta I
authors.initials: KI
authors.lastname: Kobayasi
authors.forename: Akihiro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Usami
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Riquimaroux
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005849:Gerbillinae / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological; D013997:Time Factors