Studies of binaural detection in the rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) with Pavlovian conditioning

A Pavlovian conditioned eyeblink response in rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus ) was used to study psychoacoustical phenomena previously demonstrated in h uman listeners and other animals. This article contains the results of a to ne-in-noise detection study to examine 2 psychoacoustical phenomena in rabb it and in human listeners: (a) the binaural masking level difference (BMLD) and (b) differential performance across reproducible noise masker waveform s. The rabbits demonstrated a BMLD comparable in size to other species. Sig nificant differences in performance across reproducible noise masker wavefo rms were seen in the rabbits. This performance was compared with the perfor mance of human listeners using the same set of waveforms.