Across-species differences in pitch perception are consistent with differences in cochlear filtering

Pitch perception is critical for recognizing speech, music and animal
vocalizations, but its neurobiological basis remains unsettled, in part
because of divergent results across species. We investigated whether
species-specific differences exist in the cues used to perceive pitch and
whether these can be accounted for by differences in the auditory periphery.
Ferrets accurately generalized pitch discriminations to untrained stimuli
whenever temporal envelope cues were robust in the probe sounds, but not
when resolved harmonics were the main available cue. By contrast, human
listeners exhibited the opposite pattern of results on an analogous task,
consistent with previous studies. Simulated cochlear responses in the two
species suggest that differences in the relative salience of the two pitch
cues can be attributed to differences in cochlear filter bandwidths. The
results support the view that cross-species variation in pitch perception
reflects the constraints of estimating a sound’s fundamental frequency given
species-specific cochlear tuning.