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Mark Bee, Ph.D.
Professor,
Department of
Ecology, Evolution/Behavior
E-mail: mbee@umn.edu |
Research Interests:
Research in my lab takes an integrative, comparative, and multi-disciplinary approach that draws on questions and methods from behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, human psychoacoustics, and neurophysiology to provide answers to fundamental questions about animal communication, such as: (i) How do animals encode information about themselves in the production of acoustic signals? (ii) How do animals acquire information about other conspecifics through the perception of acoustic signals? (iii) How do these processes function in natural habitats and noisy social environments? And (iv) how do these processes evolve? While open to work on numerous taxa, our principal study organisms are frogs, in which acoustic communication mediates many important behaviors related to reproduction.
We are currently focused on two major questions. First, how do animals perceive the vocalizations of other individuals in noisy social environments? In this context, we are investigating questions related to “auditory scene analysis” and the so-called “cocktail party problem” to understand how the frog auditory system forms auditory objects of acoustic signals and segregates the signals of one male from the din of background noise in a large breeding chorus. Second, what is the role of acoustic signaling in mediating the aggressive male-male interactions that arise from sexual selection and take place in social environments that are both temporally and spatially variable? In this context, our work investigates vocally mediated social recognition, behavioral plasticity, learning, and honest signaling in male frogs that defend calling sites or breeding territories.
Selected Publications:
(For a comprehensive list of recent publications, refer to PubMed, a service provided by the National Library of Medicine.)
Bee MA and Micheyl C (2008) The cocktail party problem: What is it? How can it be solved? And why should animal behaviorists study it? Journal of Comparative Psychology , 122, 235-251.
Bee MA (2008) Parallel female preferences for call duration in a diploid ancestor of an allotetraploid treefrog. Animal Behaviour , 76, 845-853.
Bee MA and Riemersma KK (2008) Does common spatial origin promote the auditory grouping of temporally separated signal elements in grey treefrogs? Animal Behaviour , 76, 831-843 .
Bee MA (2008) Finding a mate at a cocktail party: Spatial release from masking improves acoustic mate recognition in grey treefrogs. Animal Behaviour , 75, 1781-1791.
Bee MA , Buschermöhle M, and Klump GM ( 2007) Detecting modulated signals in modulated noise: II. Neural thresholds from the songbird auditory forebrain. European Journal of Neuroscience , 26, 1979-1994.
Bee MA ( 2007) Sound source segregation in the grey treefrog: Spatial release from masking by the sound of a chorus. Animal Behaviour , 74, 549-558.
Buschermöhle M, Feudel U, Klump GM, Bee MA , and Freund J (2006) Signal detection enhanced by comodulated noise. Fluctuation and Noise Letters , 6, 339-348.
Bee MA and Klump GM (2005) Auditory stream segregation in the songbird forebrain: Effects of time intervals on responses to interleaved tone sequences. Brain, Behavior and Evolution , 66, 197-214.
Bee MA and Klump GM (2004) Primitive auditory stream segregation: A neurophysiological study in the songbird forebrain. Journal of Neurophysiology , 92, 1088-1104.
Current Graduate Students:
Katrina Schrode (Neuroscience, University of Minnesota).
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