Pitch, Timbre and Intensity Interdependently Modulate Neural Responses to Salient Sounds

Kaya, Emine Merve; Huang, Nicolas; Elhilali, Mounya

doi:10.1016/j.neuroscience.2020.05.018

Cited by 15 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…In Experiment 2, we found stronger entrainment for attended compared to unattended dimensions. These findings are consistent with previous studies showing that both bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms modulate neural entrainment to distinct auditory objects (Elhilali et al, 2005; Huang & Elhilali, 2020; Kaya et al, 2020). Here we extend these findings to show that dimensional salience and dimension-selective attention can enhance neural entrainment to different acoustic dimensions within a single sound stream.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 93%

“…Previous research has shown that deviations in pitch can capture attention to auditory streams (Berti et al, 2004; Escera et al, 1998; Marois et al, 2018; Siddle et al, 1984), with the size of pupil dilation responses (Marois et al, 2018; Wetzel et al, 2016) and ERP responses (Berti et al, 2004; Rinne et al, 2006; Schröger, 1996) varying in proportion to pitch step size. Moreover, a recent EEG study has observed an increase in power and cross-trial coherence in response to deviant tones with high (+6 semitones) compared to low (+2 semitone) pitch changes (Kaya et al, 2020). Our results are consistent with these findings, showing that changes in the pitch step size elicit stronger neural entrainment specifically to pitch variations.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prior EEG work has also shown that both the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3 responses, associated with detection of acoustic change and orientation of attention respectively, are sensitive to the magnitude of the change along multiple acoustic dimensions (Escera et al, 1998; Berti et al, 2004; Rinne et al, 2006; Schröger, 1996). Salient acoustic changes can also influence the degree of neural entrainment to acoustic streams, with decreased entrainment to attended streams following salient background sounds (Huang & Elhilali, 2020) and increased entrainment to acoustic melodies following deviations in pitch, timbre and intensity (Kaya et al, 2020). These studies suggest that salient changes in a sound stream along a number of different dimensions can attract attention to the sound stream.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dimension-Selective Attention and Dimensional Salience Modulate Cortical Tracking of Acoustic Dimensions

Symons

Dick

Tierney

2021

Preprint

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Some theories of auditory categorization suggest that auditory dimensions that are strongly diagnostic for particular categories - for instance voice onset time or fundamental frequency in the case of some spoken consonants - attract attention. However, prior cognitive neuroscience research on auditory selective attention has largely focused on attention to simple auditory objects or streams, and so little is known about the neural mechanisms that underpin dimension-selective attention, or how the relative salience of variations along these dimensions might modulate neural signatures of attention. Here we investigate whether dimensional salience and dimension-selective attention modulate cortical tracking of acoustic dimensions. In two experiments, participants listened to tone sequences varying in pitch and spectral peak frequency; these two dimensions changed at systematically different rates. Inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC) and EEG signal amplitude at the rates of pitch and spectral change allowed us to measure cortical tracking of these dimensions. In Experiment 1, tone sequences varied in the size of the pitch intervals, while the size of spectral peak intervals remained constant. Neural entrainment to pitch changes was greater for sequences with larger compared to smaller pitch intervals, with no difference in entrainment to the spectral dimension. In Experiment 2, participants selectively attended to either the pitch or spectral dimension. Neural entrainment was stronger in response to the attended compared to unattended dimension for both pitch and spectral dimensions. These findings demonstrate that bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms enhance the cortical tracking of different acoustic dimensions within a single sound stream.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 93%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dimension-Selective Attention and Dimensional Salience Modulate Cortical Tracking of Acoustic Dimensions

Symons

Dick

Tierney

2021

Preprint

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“…Despite the strong evidence that research has brought for the soundscape, our understanding of the action of the Peripheral and Central Nervous System (PNS and CNS) associated with environmental sound interpretation and the factors influencing the perception of sound is still evolving and a matter of dispute among scientific communities. Understanding of the soundscape is intimately tied to certain key factors known as primary factors of the soundscape comprising acoustic properties (physical features) of the sound such as frequency/ pitch (Kumar, Forster, Bailey, Griffiths, 2008;Patchett, 1979) and intensity/loudness (Kaya, Huang, Elhilali, 2020) and secondary influences like emotions and personality traits (McDermott, 2012).…”

Section: Psychological Well-being and Demographic Factors Can Mediate Soundscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Well-being and Demographic Factors can Mediate Soundscape Pleasantness and Eventfulness: A large sample study

Erfanian

Mitchell

Aletta

et al. 2020

Preprint

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There is a great deal of literature on contributing environmental factors of soundscape, the perception of the acoustic environment by humans in context. Yet the impact of some contextual and person-related factors is largely unknown. From the questionnaire, adapted from ISO12913-2 and the WHO-5 well-being index, three questions arose: are there differences in Pleasantness and Eventfulness of soundscape among different acoustic environments; are high levels of psychological well-being associated with increased Pleasantness and Eventfulness ratings; and is soundscape Pleasantness and Eventfulness consistent among different age and gender groups? The sample comprised 1180 individual questionnaires, 621 females (52.6%), 532 males (45.1%), mean age 34.95 years, SD= 15.62, collected from eleven urban locations. Hierarchical clustering analysis was done on the mean of each sound source question for each survey location resulting in three clusters of locations based on sound source composition: Natural-dominant, Traffic-dominant and Mixed-sources. A Kruskal-Wallis was conducted to compare the mean Pleasantness and Eventfulness scores of the three clusters, demonstrating that the soundscape assessment was significantly different depending on sound source composition. Multiple linear regression models were used to analyse the relationship between psychological well-being, age, and gender with soundscape Pleasantness and Eventfulness. Our results indicated first that the positive psychological state was associated with Pleasantness in the all-locations and mixed-sources clusters, and with Eventfulness in the traffic-dominant cluster. Secondly, while age was linked to Pleasantness in all clusters it was merely associated with the Eventfulness in the all-locations cluster. Lastly, gender was associated with Pleasantness only in the all-locations cluster. These findings offer empirical grounds for developing theories of the contextual factors on soundscape.

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“…In contrast, in the auditory domain, there is no established framework to study salience ( Kaya and Elhilali, 2017 ). Some experimental schemes examine auditory salience as the ability of the stimulus to pop-out while the subject is actively engaged in the task ( Kaya et al , 2020 ; Southwell et al , 2017 ), whereas others use attention tracking mechanisms to measure salience continuously while subjects are attending to the stimuli ( Huang and Elhilali, 2017 ; Zhao et al , 2019b ). In addition, distractor paradigms are considered in some studies to probe attentional deployment in the presence of distracting salient events ( Petsas et al , 2016 ; Southwell et al , 2017 ; Vachon et al , 2017 ); alternatively, detection tasks collect feedback from subjects about their judgments of event salience or relative salience after a stimulus is presented ( Kaya and Elhilali, 2014 ; Kayser et al , 2005 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory salience using natural scenes: An online study

Kothinti

Huang

Elhilali

2021

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Salience is the quality of a sensory signal that attracts involuntary attention in humans. While it primarily reflects conspicuous physical attributes of a scene, our understanding of processes underlying what makes a certain object or event salient remains limited. In the vision literature, experimental results, theoretical accounts, and large amounts of eye-tracking data using rich stimuli have shed light on some of the underpinnings of visual salience in the brain. In contrast, studies of auditory salience have lagged behind due to limitations in both experimental designs and stimulus datasets used to probe the question of salience in complex everyday soundscapes. In this work, we deploy an online platform to study salience using a dichotic listening paradigm with natural auditory stimuli. The study validates crowd-sourcing as a reliable platform to collect behavioral responses to auditory salience by comparing experimental outcomes to findings acquired in a controlled laboratory setting. A model-based analysis demonstrates the benefits of extending behavioral measures of salience to broader selection of auditory scenes and larger pools of subjects. Overall, this effort extends our current knowledge of auditory salience in everyday soundscapes and highlights the limitations of low-level acoustic attributes in capturing the richness of natural soundscapes.

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Pitch, Timbre and Intensity Interdependently Modulate Neural Responses to Salient Sounds

Cited by 15 publications

References 75 publications

Dimension-Selective Attention and Dimensional Salience Modulate Cortical Tracking of Acoustic Dimensions

Dimension-Selective Attention and Dimensional Salience Modulate Cortical Tracking of Acoustic Dimensions

Psychological Well-being and Demographic Factors can Mediate Soundscape Pleasantness and Eventfulness: A large sample study

Auditory salience using natural scenes: An online study

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