Draft:Robert Dooling

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Robert J. Dooling
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Psychologist and academic
Academic background
Education	B.S., Biology and Chemistry M.S., Biology and Psychology Ph.D., Physiological Psychology
Alma mater	Creighton University St. Louis University
Academic work
Institutions	University of Maryland

Robert J. Dooling is an American psychologist and an academic. He is an emeritus as well as a research professor at the University of Maryland.

Dooling's has conducted research on hearing and neuroethology, with a focus on understanding how birds and other animals communicate with one another acoustically and drawing parallels between human and animal hearing and communication. He has authored and edited books including Comparative Hearing: Birds and Reptiles and The Comparative Psychology of Audition: Perceiving Complex Sound.

Education

Dooling received his B.S. in Biology and Chemistry in 1967 from Creighton University. He completed his M.S. in Biology and Psychology in 1969 and later, his Ph.D. in Physiological Psychology in 1975 from St. Louis University.

Career

Dooling began his academic career as a research assistant for the Central Institute for the Deaf, working there from 1967 to 1969 and 1971 to 1975. He was the postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University from 1975 and 1977 and was appointed as an assistant professor at Rockefeller University between 1977 and 1981. He was appointed as an assistant professor at Department of Psychology at University of Maryland in 1981. He became associate professor in 1984, full professor in 1988 and emeritus professor in 2019.

Dooling was director of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program from 2007 to 2013 and was co-director for the Neuroscience Major at the University of Maryland between 2019 and 2020.

Research

Dooling's earlier research focused on the behavioral investigations of hearing in small birds. He showed that the audiogram of small birds is generally very similar but other measures, such as hearing in noise (in the budgerigar), and the discrimination of fine details in song (in the zebra finch), revealed marked differences from other birds. Correspondingly, he also showed that budgerigars perceive human speech sound categories regardless of talker differences, questioning the accepted dogma that speech sound categories were unique to humans. He also showed that adult budgerigars develop convergent contact calls through mutual vocal imitations of social companions. In related research, he studied the effect of hearing loss and recovery of hearing and call production among budgerigars. He showed that budgerigars, like humans, could adjust the intensity of their vocalizations voluntarily and in response to hearing loss or noise in their environment. His findings established that the birds monitored their vocal output through external auditory feedback and, like humans, also demonstrated the Lombard effect. He also recorded the auditory brainstem response (ABR) in young and adult birds and tracked the progress of hearing loss and hearing recovery from loud noise exposure using the ABR waves.

In later research, Dooling demonstrated that zebra finches are sensitive to the fine acoustic details of individual syllables in their song, well beyond the capabilities of other birds or humans, suggesting zebra finches live in an auditory world to which humans are not privy. Further studies showed that zebra finches can discriminate between the renditions of different voices, even at the level of single song syllables; confirming that fine acoustic details in song syllables are the primary channel of vocal communication in this species.

Awards and honors

• 1983 – Behavioral Science Research Award, Washington Academy of Sciences
• 2002 – Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award, University of Maryland

Bibliography

Books

• Dooling, Robert J.; Hulse, Stewart H. (1989). The Comparative Psychology of Audition: Perceiving Complex Sounds. L. Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 9780805800203.
• Klump, G. M.; Dooling, R. J.; Fay, Richard R.; Stebbins, William (1995). Methods in Comparative Psychoacoustics. Birkhäuser Basel. ISBN 9783034874656.
• Comparative Hearing: Birds and Reptiles. 2000. ISBN 9780387946849.
• Slabbekoorn, Hans; Dooling, Robert J.; Popper, Arthur N.; Fay, Richard R. (2018). Effects of Anthropogenic Noise on Animals. Springer. ISBN 9781493993307.

Selected articles

• Okanoya, K.; Dooling, R. J. (1987). "Hearing in passerine and psittacine birds: A comparative study of absolute and masked auditory thresholds". Journal of Comparative Psychology. 101 (1): 7–15. doi:10.1037/0735-7036.101.1.7. PMID 3568610.
• Farabaugh, S. M.; Linzenbold, A.; Dooling, R. J. (1994). "Vocal plasticity in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus): evidence for social factors in the learning of contact calls". Journal of Comparative Psychology. 108 (1): 81–92. doi:10.1037/0735-7036.108.1.81. PMID 8174348.
• Lohr, B.; Wright, T. F.; Dooling, R. J. (2003). "Detection and discrimination of natural calls in masking noise by birds: estimating the active space of a signal". Animal Behaviour. 65 (4): 763–777. doi:10.1006/anbe.2003.2093.
• Dooling, R. J.; Popper, A. N. (2016). "Some lessons from the effects of highway noise on birds". Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics. 27 (1). AIP Publishing: 010004. doi:10.1121/2.0000244.
• Dooling, R. J.; Blumenrath, S. H. (2016). "Masking Experiments in Humans and Birds Using Anthropogenic Noises". The Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life II. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology. Vol. 875. Springer New York. pp. 239–243. doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-2981-8_28. ISBN 978-1-4939-2980-1. PMID 26610965.

External links

• Robert Dooling publications indexed by Google Scholar

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• American psychologists
• Creighton University alumni
• Saint Louis University alumni
• University of Maryland, College Park faculty
• American academics