Mechanisms for Communicating in a Marmoset "Cocktail Party"

A key challenge for audition is parsing the voice of a single speaker amid a cacophony of other voices known as the Cocktail Party Problem (CPP). Despite its prevalence, relatively little remains known about how our simian cousins resolve the CPP for active, natural communication. Here we employed an innovative, multi-speaker paradigm comprising five computer-generated Virtual Monkeys (VM) whose respective vocal behavior could be systematically varied to construct marmoset cocktail parties and tested the impact of specific acoustic scene manipulations on subject natural conversations. Results indicate that marmosets not only employ auditory mechanisms - including attention - for speaker stream segregation, but also selectively change their own vocal behavior in response to the dynamics of the acoustic scene. These findings suggest notable parallels with human audition to solve the CPP and highlight the active role that individuals play to optimize communicative efficacy in complex real-world acoustic scenes.