Primates

The hearing of other species in the division of mammals to which humankind belongs has always been of special interest. A number of species have been studied, including monkeys, marmosets, and chimpanzees among the primates considered as the most advanced, the anthropoids; and tree shrews, lemurs, and lorises among the more primitive.

By using a variety of training methods with chimpanzees, monkeys, and marmosets, behavioral thresholds have been recorded in response to sounds of different intensities and frequencies. When compared with each other and with humans, it has been found that the hearing sensitivity of these animals and humans is remarkably similar over a range of frequencies from 100 to 5,000 hertz, after which the sensitivity begins to differ. The differences observed at the higher frequencies, however, may be partly attributed to variations in experimental procedures. Thus, the results for the chimpanzee stop at 8,192 hertz because this was the highest tone used in the tests. Other observations have shown that chimpanzees can hear tones up to about 33,000 hertz and that young human subjects often hear tones as high as 24,000 hertz. It is also evident that monkeys and marmosets of the species studied can hear still higher tones.

Common laboratory animals

Certain mammals have long been favourite subjects for various kinds of biological studies in the laboratory, largely because of their convenient size, hardiness under caged conditions, and gentle temperament. Familiar among these are cats, dogs, guinea pigs, rats, mice, rabbits, and, more recently, hamsters, chinchillas, and gerbils. Auditory sensitivity functions have been obtained in these animals by a variety of behavioral and electrophysiological methods.

When measured behaviorally by conditioned responses and then plotted on a curve, the auditory threshold sensitivity of cats, guinea pigs, and chinchillas is much the same—a progressive improvement in sensitivity as the frequency is raised until the middle tones (about 500 to 5,000 hertz) are reached, at which point sensitivity tends to remain the same, and then shows a rapid loss in the upper frequencies. There are differences, however, in the maximum sensitivity attained in the middle region, with the guinea pig the least sensitive and the cat the most sensitive of the three species.

Sensory responses in the cochlea of mammals have been measured electrophysiologically by placing an electrode on the round window membrane. Unlike behavioral curves, however, the curves obtained by plotting the sound required to produce an arbitrary amount of electrical potential of the cochlea do not represent auditory thresholds. Instead, their usefulness is largely in their shapes, which indicate in a relative way the regions of good and poor sensitivity. In addition, these curves represent the performance of the peripheral portion of the auditory mechanism up to the point at which the sound stimulus activates the sensory hair cells in which the potentials are generated. Hence, unlike the curves obtained by behavioral responses, those obtained by cochlear potential methods do not indicate the performance of the central auditory nervous system (the nerve connections between the ear and brain and those parts of the brain in which neural impulses from the ear are processed to produce behavioral responses).

In the simpler animals, the two types of curves are much alike, judging from the very limited evidence available. In mammals, however, the behavioral curves differ from the cochlear potential curves in three ways. In the behavioral curves there is (1) an exaggerated gain in sensitivity to tones of low frequency, (2) a greater sensitivity to the medium-high tones, and (3) a more rapid loss of sensitivity to the extreme-high tones and a lower frequency of the upper limit. These differences are believed to arise mainly through the elaborate neural processing that takes place in the more highly developed mammalian nervous system, a processing that improves the sensitivitity to high-frequency tones but reaches a limit of effectiveness and finally fails above some frequency limit. With these conditions in mind, the electrophysiological curves can be used to predict reasonably well an animal’s behavioral responses to sound waves.

Large mammals

Because most of the mammals in which hearing has been studied by laboratory methods are small, much less is known about the auditory capabilities of large ones, even of such domesticated animals as horses and cows. Nevertheless, it is usually assumed that the auditory capabilities of these animals are much like those of humans. At least they hear sounds in the human vocal range, because they seem to respond to verbal signals. Elephants, for example, trained as working animals, are said to obey as many as 30 different commands. A number of wild animals of medium and large size—raccoons, opossums, and several members of the cat and dog families—have been studied electrophysiologically by the cochlear-response method. Their sensitivity curves are fairly similar in form and in the upper limits attained.

Marine mammals

Of special interest are the sea mammals, which have been derived from early land species and which have undergone certain changes in order to adapt themselves to at least a partially aquatic existence. In the course of adapting to marine conditions, however, some sea mammals, such as seals and sea lions, seem to have made only limited alterations in their ear structures. In addition to being able to close the meatus when diving, their pinnas have been greatly reduced or essentially lost, a feature of streamlining for rapid progress through the water.

There are three possible ways that the hearing of marine mammals might be adapted to an aquatic environment: (1) unchanged aerial hearing, with no aquatic adaptation, (2) conversion to an aquatic type of hearing with loss of good hearing for aerial sounds, and (3) development of some kind of double system, with at least serviceable reception of both aerial and aquatic vibrations. In a study of hearing in the common seal, in which responses to aerial and aquatic stimuli were compared, it was found that this animal has a greater sensitivity to aquatic sounds, especially in the upper frequencies, which extended to the remarkably high frequency of 160,000 hertz. Yet, although the seal has made an adjustment for hearing in water, it has not sacrificed the quality of its aerial hearing, which remains at an excellent level, especially for one frequency around 2,000 hertz and another around 12,000 hertz. These differences in auditory senstivity suggest that the mechanisms in this animal for aerial and aquatic hearing are somehow different, but no complete explanation of the adaptations has yet been found.

Whales, on the other hand, have converted their ears to a truly aquatic form, apparently with some sacrifice of aerial reception. The study of their ears and hearing has been carried out in only a few species of the toothed whales, which produce sounds and use their ears in the process of echolocation (see next section).

The ear of whales has undergone extensive changes. The pinna is absent and the external ear opening has been reduced to such a minute size, almost a pinhole in some species, that it no longer serves as a path for the entrance of sound. The eardrum, although present in a modified form, seems to serve no useful purpose; it is connected to the malleus only by a ligament, and this connection can be cut without an ensuing loss of sound reception. The usual three ossicles of the middle ear are present, with the footplate of the stapes resting in the oval window. These ossicles are much more massive than the ordinary mammalian ossicles.

It appears that the whale ear has been converted to a true aquatic type, functioning according to principles similar to those found in the ears of fishes, as described earlier. Sound vibrations in the water readily pass through the tissues of the head and reach the deep-lying middle- and inner-ear structures. Probably the ossicles represent an inertial mass in somewhat the same way that the otolithic body does in fishes. Because of their inertia, the ossicles tend to move with smaller amplitudes and in different phase relations when the tissues of the head, including parts of the cochlea, are set in vibration. This difference in relative motion produces an alternating displacement of the cochlear fluid, which is in contact with the footplate of the stapes and which can be set in motion because of the presence of a pocket of gas in the region of the round window. The performance of the whale ear has been measured in an exact manner throughout the frequency range in one species, the bottle-nosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). By a conditioned-response method, it has been found that this animal possesses excellent auditory sensitivity that extends well into the high frequencies.