Dr. Micheal Dent

Dr. Michael Dent

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Maryland
Office: B76 Park Hall
Phone: (716) 645-0266
E-mail: mdent@buffalo.edu
Url: Personally maintained website

 

Summary of Research Interests:

My laboratory investigates the perception of complex acoustic stimuli in birds and small mammals using both behavioral and physiological techniques. These stimuli include speech sounds, binaural stimuli, and stimuli that produce auditory illusions. Demonstrations of auditory illusions in animals are extremely important for understanding auditory functioning in realistic environments in both normal and hearing-impaired populations. I am interested in determining whether birds exhibit certain illusions and what the underlying neural correlates are to these illusions – that is, where the disconnect occurs between the presented stimulus and the perceived stimulus.

Representative Publications:

  • Dent, M.L., Welch, T.E., McClaine, E., and Shinn-Cunningham, B.G. (2008). Species differences in the identification of acoustic stimuli by birds. Behavioural Processes 77, 184-190.
  • Dent, M.L., McClaine, E.M., and Welch, T.E. (2007). The Franssen Effect illusion in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 112, 3609-3614.
  • Narayan, R., Best, V., Ozmeral, E., McClaine, E., Dent, M.L., Shinn-Cunningham, B., and Sen, K. (2007). Cortical interference effects in the cocktail party problem. Nature Neuroscience 10, 1601-1607.
  • Dent, M.L., Tollin, D.J., & Yin, T.C.T. (2005). Psychophysical and physiological studies of the precedence effect in cats. Acta Acustica 91, 463-470.
  • Dent, M.L., and Dooling, R.J. (2004). The precedence effect in three species of birds. Journal of Comparative Psychology 118, 325-331.
  • Dent, M.L., Klump, G.M., and Schwenzfeier, C. (2002). Temporal modulation transfer functions in the barn owl (Tyto alba). Journal of Comparative Physiology A 187, 937-943.
  • Dent, M.L., Dooling, R.J., and Pierce, A. S. (2000). Frequency discrimination in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus): Effects of tonal duration and tonal context. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 107, 2657-2664.
  • Dent, M.L., Larsen, O.N., & Dooling, R.J. (1997). Free-field binaural unmasking in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). Behavioral Neuroscience 111, 590-598.