AUTHOR=Grinfeder Elie , Sueur Jérôme , McWalter Richard , Apoux Frédéric , Lorenzi Christian 

TITLE=Auditory perception of biodiversity by human listeners

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1552329

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1552329

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=IntroductionThis study explored human auditory capacity to evaluate the number of biological sound sources in natural soundscapes.MethodsThis 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.Results and discussionAlthough 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.