Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 8, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15027
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- ERC Grant 'ADAM' [295603]
- Entendre SAS
- [ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC]
- [ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
A perceptual phenomenon is reported, whereby prior acoustic context has a large, rapid and long-lasting effect on a basic auditory judgement. Pairs of tones were devised to include ambiguous transitions between frequency components, such that listeners were equally likely to report an upward or downward 'pitch' shift between tones. We show that presenting context tones before the ambiguous pair almost fully determines the perceived direction of shift. The context effect generalizes to a wide range of temporal and spectral scales, encompassing the characteristics of most realistic auditory scenes. Magnetoencephalographic recordings show that a relative reduction in neural responsivity is correlated to the behavioural effect. Finally, a computational model reproduces behavioural results, by implementing a simple constraint of continuity for binding successive sounds in a probabilistic manner. Contextual processing, mediated by ubiquitous neural mechanisms such as adaptation, may be crucial to track complex sound sources over time.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available