ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Perception Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1552329
This article is part of the Research TopicImpact of Acoustic Environments and Noise on Auditory PerceptionView all 10 articles
Auditory perception of biodiversity by human listeners
Provisionally accepted
- 1Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France
- 2École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, Cachan, Île-de-France, France
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This study explored human auditory capacity to evaluate the number of biological sound sources in natural soundscapes. This was achieved by measuring the ability of human participants to judge the number of birds when listening to soundscapes generated by an engineering algorithm that controlled for bird abundance, species richness, level disparities between songs, bird behavior and background noise. Although often inaccurate, numerosity judgments were generally affected by the number of birds, demonstrating sub-optimal sensitivity to biodiversity in humans. Numerosity judgments were robust to low-intensity background sounds, and higher when between-species acoustic disparities were introduced, suggesting that grouping mechanisms contribute to biodiversity perception.
Keywords: human auditory ecology, Soundscape ecology, biodiversity perception, bird chorus, noise pollution
Received: 27 Dec 2024; Accepted: 13 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Grinfeder, Sueur, Mcwalter, Apoux and Lorenzi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Elie Grinfeder, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, 75005, France
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