To overcome variability, estimate scene characteristics, and compress sensory input, perceptual systems pool data into statistical summaries. Despite growing evidence for statistical representations in perception, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. One example of such representations occurs in auditory scenes, where background texture appears to be represented with time-averaged sound statistics. We probed the averaging mechanism using "texture steps"-textures containing subtle shifts in stimulus statistics. Although generally imperceptible, steps occurring in the previous several seconds biased texture judgments, indicative of a multi-second averaging window. Listeners seemed unable to willfully extend or restrict this window but showed signatures of longer integration times for temporally variable textures. In all cases the measured timescales were substantially longer than previously reported integration times in the auditory system. Integration also showed signs of being restricted to sound elements attributed to a common source. The results suggest an integration process that depends on stimulus characteristics, integrating over longer extents when it benefits statistical estimation of variable signals and selectively integrating stimulus components likely to have a common cause in the world. Our methodology could be naturally extended to examine statistical representations of other types of sensory signals.

Sound sources in the world are experienced as stable even when intermittently obscured, implying perceptual completion mechanisms that “fill in” missing sensory information. We demonstrate a filling-in phenomenon in which the brain extrapolates the statistics of background sounds (textures) over periods of several seconds when they are interrupted by another sound, producing vivid percepts of illusory texture. The effect differs from previously described completion effects in that 1) the extrapolated sound must be defined statistically given the stochastic nature of texture, and 2) the effect lasts much longer, enabling introspection and facilitating assessment of the underlying representation. Illusory texture biases subsequent texture statistic estimates indistinguishably from actual texture, suggesting that it is represented similarly to actual texture. The illusion appears to represent an inference about whether the background is likely to continue during concurrent sounds, providing a stable statistical representation of the ongoing environment despite unstable sensory evidence.

Sound textures, such as crackling fire or chirping crickets, represent a broad class of sounds defined by their homogeneous temporal structure. It has been suggested that the perception of texture is mediated by time-averaged summary statistics measured from early auditory representations. In this study, we investigated the perception of sound textures that contain rhythmic structure, specifically second-order amplitude modulations that arise from the interaction of different modulation rates, previously described as “beating” in the envelope-frequency domain. We developed an auditory texture model that utilizes a cascade of modulation filterbanks that capture the structure of simple rhythmic patterns. The model was examined in a series of psychophysical listening experiments using synthetic sound textures—stimuli generated using time-averaged statistics measured from real-world textures. In a texture identification task, our results indicated that second-order amplitude modulation sensitivity enhanced recognition. Next, we examined the contribution of the second-order modulation analysis in a preference task, where the proposed auditory texture model was preferred over a range of model deviants that lacked second-order modulation rate sensitivity. Lastly, the discriminability of textures that included second-order amplitude modulations appeared to be perceived using a time-averaging process. Overall, our results demonstrate that the inclusion of second-order modulation analysis generates improvements in the perceived quality of synthetic textures compared to the first-order modulation analysis considered in previous approaches.

Sound sources in the world are experienced as stable even when intermittently obscured, implying perceptual completion mechanisms that "fill in" missing sensory information. We demonstrate a filling-in phenomenon in which the brain extrapolates the statistics of background sounds (textures) over periods of several seconds when they are interrupted by another sound, producing vivid percepts of illusory texture. The effect differs from previously described completion effects in that 1) the extrapolated sound must be defined statistically given the stochastic nature of texture, and 2) in lasting much longer, enabling introspection and facilitating assessment of the underlying representation. Illusory texture appeared to be integrated into texture statistic estimates indistinguishably from actual texture, suggesting that it is represented similarly to actual texture. The illusion appears to represent an inference about whether the background is likely to continue during concurrent sounds, providing a stable representation of the environment despite unstable sensory evidence.