Glenis Long's contribution to animal psychoacoustics

Abstract

Glenis and I were psychology graduate students together in 1970-1971. She was interested in auditory psychophysics, but soon developed an interest in comparative psychophysics which she pursued in a post-doc and a faculty position in Germany, where she obtained a behavioral audiogram for the horseshoe bat and later studied masking in the same species. This audiogram was one of the very first psychophysical investigations of hearing in any bat and the very first for the horseshoe bat. It confirmed a rather complex frequency response function with sensitivity peaks at about 20 kHz and 60 kHz, and a very sharp peak at about 80 kHz. The masked thresholds indicated rather normal critical masking ratios (CR) except in a narrow region at about 80 kHz where the CRs are up to 15 dB lower than expected, suggesting a critical band of about 300 Hz at 80 kHz that is presumably used in Doppler-shift compensation. In 1981-1983, Glenis went on to investigate frequency and rate modulation discrimination in the chinchilla, for the first time, and to study tone-on-tone masking in the chinchilla. Since these early works, Glenis has maintained her comparative interests with studies on birds, kangaroo rats, frogs, and fleas on cats. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.