Mark Bee

Biography

I am broadly interested in discovering how animals acquire and process information in acoustic signals. To do so, my research draws on questions and methods from a number of different disciplines, including auditory neuroscience, auditory perception, behavioral biology, and comparative psychology. My principal study organisms are frogs, which use acoustic communication to mediate key social and reproductive behaviors. My current work utilizes female mate choice in North American treefrogs as a tool to investigate basic signal processing strategies for perceptually segregating vocalizations of interest from other overlapping signals and high background noise levels. Treefrogs are a natural choice for this line of inquiry, because they have evolved to communicate vocally in dense social environments (breeding choruses) characterized by high levels of noise and acoustic clutter. I am interested in how, in these environments, frogs cope with the problems of energetic and informational masking and the challenges of assigning sounds to their correct sources. Research in my lab uses a variety of techniques to address these questions, including psychophysical experiments in the laboratory, field playback experiments, recordings of auditory evoked potentials (e.g., ABR), single-neuron recordings from the brain, and biophysical measurements of the auditory periphery using laser Doppler vibrometry.

Research Interest

We use frogs as models animals to investigate basic questions in vertebrate hearing and sound communication. Acoustic communication is critically important in the social and reproductive behaviors of frogs. We are particularly interested in understanding how the frog auditory system processes signal information in noisy environments. We investigate this in the contexts of female mate choice and male-male competition. Frogs are a powerful model system for addressing such issues because (i) male frogs signal in large breeding aggregations, they use acoustic signals to defend calling sites, and they have a relatively small repertoire of stereotyped acoustic signals; (ii) female frogs choose mates based primarily on the acoustic properties of male signals; (iii) both male and female frogs are amenable to field and laboratory playback studies using real and computer-generated signals; and (iv) hearing and sound communication in frogs can be studied at multiple levels, from broad evolutionary patterns to the responses of single neurons in the brain. Our research takes an integrative and cross-disciplinary approach to ask questions across all of these levels.