Effect of background clutter on neural discrimination in the bat auditory midbrain

Abstract

Bats are powerful animal models for investigating the encoding of auditory objects under acoustically challenging conditions. Although past work has considered the effect of acoustic clutter on sonar target detection, less is known about target discrimination in clutter. Our work shows that the neural encoding of auditory objects was affected by clutter in a distance-dependent manner. These findings advance the knowledge on auditory object detection and discrimination and noise-dependent stimulus enhancement.