Broad-scale pesticide screening finds anticoagulant rodenticide and legacy pesticides in Australian frogs.

Pesticide contamination poses a significant threat to non-target wildlife, including amphibians, many of which are already highly threatened. This study assessed the extent of pesticide exposure in dead frogs collected during a mass mortality event across eastern New South Wales, Australia between July 2021 and March 2022. Liver tissue from 77 individual frogs of six species were analysed for >600 legacy and contemporary pesticides, including rodenticides.

Informational masking influences segmental and suprasegmental speech categorization.

Auditory categorization requires listeners to integrate acoustic information from multiple dimensions. Attentional theories suggest that acoustic dimensions that are informative attract attention and therefore receive greater perceptual weight during categorization. However, the acoustic environment is often noisy, with multiple sound sources competing for listeners' attention.

Salient sounds distort time perception and production.

The auditory world is often cacophonous, with some sounds capturing attention and distracting us from our goals. Despite the universality of this experience, many questions remain about how and why sound captures attention, how rapidly behavior is disrupted, and how long this interference lasts. Here, we use a novel measure of behavioral disruption to test predictions made by models of auditory salience.

Musical experience is linked to enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch and increased primary weighting during suprasegmental categorization.

Speech perception requires the integration of evidence from acoustic cues across multiple dimensions. Individuals differ in their cue weighting strategies, that is, the weight they assign to different dimensions during speech categorization. In two experiments, we investigate musical training as one potential predictor of individual differences in prosodic cue weighting strategies.