Rapid Formation of Robust Auditory Memories: Insights from Noise

Agus, Trevor; Thorpe, Simon J.; Pressnitzer, Daniel

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.04.014

Cited by 190 publications

(403 citation statements)

References 41 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

346

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…If listeners created new representations specific to the gating task, they would have had to do so in an unsupervised manner and very rapidly. This is not inconsistent with recent results on auditory learning (Agus et al, 2010b) but still represents a real computational challenge. Another, perhaps more parsimonious explanation is that the representation of some spectral cues to timbre can be activated, at least partially, by very limited acoustic input.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 44%

Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Suied¹,

Agus

Thorpe

et al. 2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sounds such as the voice or musical instruments can be recognized on the basis of timbre alone. Here, sound recognition was investigated with severely reduced timbre cues. Short snippets of naturally recorded sounds were extracted from a large corpus. Listeners were asked to report a target category (e.g., sung voices) among other sounds (e.g., musical instruments). All sound categories covered the same pitch range, so the task had to be solved on timbre cues alone. The minimum duration for which performance was above chance was found to be short, on the order of a few milliseconds, with the best performance for voice targets. Performance was independent of pitch and was maintained when stimuli contained less than a full waveform cycle. Recognition was not generally better when the sound snippets were time-aligned with the sound onset compared to when they were extracted with a random starting time. Finally, performance did not depend on feedback or training, suggesting that the cues used by listeners in the artificial gating task were similar to those relevant for longer, more familiar sounds. The results show that timbre cues for sound recognition are available at a variety of time scales, including very short ones.

show abstract

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 44%

Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Suied¹,

Agus

Thorpe

et al. 2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Individual features of repeated segments of noise, for instance, can be detected and learned [30][31][32][33][34] . In these cases, repetition seems to allow detail to be retained that would otherwise be discarded.…”

Section: Related Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Summary statistics in auditory perception

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sensory signals are transduced at high resolution, but their structure must be stored in a more compact format. Here we provide evidence that the auditory system summarizes the temporal details of sounds using time-averaged statistics. We measured discrimination of 'sound textures' that were characterized by particular statistical properties, as normally result from the superposition of many acoustic features in auditory scenes. When listeners discriminated examples of different textures, performance improved with excerpt duration. In contrast, when listeners discriminated different examples of the same texture, performance declined with duration, a paradoxical result given that the information available for discrimination grows with duration. These results indicate that once these sounds are of moderate length, the brain's representation is limited to time-averaged statistics, which, for different examples of the same texture, converge to the same values with increasing duration. Such statistical representations produce good categorical discrimination, but limit the ability to discern temporal detail.

show abstract

“…This characteristic of auditory sensory memory suggests that the auditory system can represent several sets of sounds at any given time. On the other hand, general access to detailed auditory information appears to be limited in time (2 -20 s, depending on the testing procedure), although some forms of access are available even for a much longer time [7]. Listeners can, for example, detect sound patterns periodically repeating with a 5 -10 s cycle, but not ones exceeding ca 10-20 s [8,9].…”

Section: The Nature Of the Representations Underlying Sequential Groumentioning

confidence: 99%

Multistability in auditory stream segregation: a predictive coding view

Winkler

Denham

Mill

et al. 2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

108

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Auditory stream segregation involves linking temporally separate acoustic events into one or more coherent sequences. For any non-trivial sequence of sounds, many alternative descriptions can be formed, only one or very few of which emerge in awareness at any time. Evidence from studies showing bi-/multistability in auditory streaming suggest that some, perhaps many of the alternative descriptions are represented in the brain in parallel and that they continuously vie for conscious perception. Here, based on a predictive coding view, we consider the nature of these sound representations and how they compete with each other. Predictive processing helps to maintain perceptual stability by signalling the continuation of previously established patterns as well as the emergence of new sound sources. It also provides a measure of how well each of the competing representations describes the current acoustic scene. This account of auditory stream segregation has been tested on perceptual data obtained in the auditory streaming paradigm.

show abstract

Rapid Formation of Robust Auditory Memories: Insights from Noise

Cited by 190 publications

References 41 publications

Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Summary statistics in auditory perception

Multistability in auditory stream segregation: a predictive coding view

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About