Categorization of Extremely Brief Auditory Stimuli: Domain-Specific or Domain-General Processes?

Bigand, Emmanuel; Delbé, Charles; Gérard, Yannick; Tillmann, Barbara

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0027024

Cited by 29 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In other settings, if pitch or even pitch-strength were actually informative about the sound source (Lewis et al, 2009), it is quite likely that listeners would use this cue. It could be why we found a clear voice advantage in all of our experiments, whereas another gating study failed to find such an effect-but without controlling for pitch (Bigand et al, 2011).…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 57%

“…We also found an advantage for vocal sounds, which seemed to be recognized at shorter durations than musical instruments. Finally, Bigand et al (2011) compared identification performance for three sound categories: voices, music, and environmental sounds, at gating durations of 20 ms to 200 ms. They reported that at least music and voices seemed to be recognizable at the shortest duration tested (20 ms), but they did not find any advantage for vocal sounds.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, this reduced the variability between exemplars of each category, thus making the task easier: For instance, cues specific to each particular exemplar (and not related to its category) could have been learned during the course of an experiment. In the study of Bigand et al (2011), neither pitch nor harmonic-to-noise ratio were controlled for, even though such cues differ widely between the sound categories investigated and could serve as recognition cues. As a consequence, it is unclear whether listeners used only timbre cues in this study.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a consequence, it is unclear whether listeners used only timbre cues in this study. The lack of an advantage for vocal sounds in Bigand et al (2011) may stem from this methodological choice. Finally, there is no consistent set of durations tested across studies, in particular contrasting chance with above-chance performance to pinpoint the minimal duration of sound required for recognition.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Suied¹,

Agus

Thorpe

et al. 2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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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.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 57%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Suied¹,

Agus

Thorpe

et al. 2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…accumulated evidence over time, i.e. their duration in time (Bigand et al;see also Bestelmeyer et al, 2011). This is because all the presented sounds were easily recognized when presented for a longer duration (i.e.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Auditory perceptual decision-making based on semantic categorization of environmental sounds

et al. 2012

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Discriminating complex sounds relies on multiple stages of differential brain activity. The specific roles of these stages and their links to perception were the focus of the present study. We presented 250 ms duration sounds of living and man-made objects while recording 160-channel electroencephalography (EEG). Subjects categorized each sound as that of a living, man-made or unknown item. We tested whether/when the brain discriminates between sound categories even when not transpiring behaviorally. We applied a single-trial classifier that identified voltage topographies and latencies at which brain responses are most discriminative. For sounds that the subjects could not categorize, we could successfully decode the semantic category based on differences in voltage topographies during the 116-174 ms post-stimulus period. Sounds that were correctly categorized as that of a living or man-made item by the same subjects exhibited two periods of differences in voltage topographies at the single-trial level. Subjects exhibited differential activity before the sound ended (starting at 112 ms) and on a separate period at~270 ms post-stimulus onset. Because each of these periods could be used to reliably decode semantic categories, we interpreted the first as being related to an implicit tuning for sound representations and the second as being linked to perceptual decision-making processes. Collectively, our results show that the brain discriminates environmental sounds during early stages and independently of behavioral proficiency and that explicit sound categorization requires a subsequent processing stage.

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Auditory Pareidolia: Effects of Contextual Priming on Perceptions of Purportedly Paranormal and Ambiguous Auditory Stimuli

Nees

Phillips

2014

Applied Cognitive Psychology

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SummaryReality television programs that explore purportedly paranormal phenomena with pseudoscientific research approaches have emerged in popular culture. These shows commonly feature electronic voice phenomena (EVP), whereby recording devices capture audio signals that are interpreted as paranormal messages. We compared perceptions for voices in EVP with actual speech, acoustic noise, and degraded speech. Some participants were told that the experiment was about speech intelligibility, whereas others were told that the experiment was about paranormal EVP. The paranormal prime increased the proportion of trials for which participants perceived voices in both EVP stimuli and degraded speech. When a voice was detected, low agreement was found regarding the content of EVP messages. In both priming conditions, participants reported general skepticism in the paranormal. Results are discussed in the context of theoretical perspectives on paranormal events, trait‐versus‐state accounts of paranormal beliefs, and pseudoscientific approaches to research. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Categorization of Extremely Brief Auditory Stimuli: Domain-Specific or Domain-General Processes?

Cited by 29 publications

References 33 publications

Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Auditory perceptual decision-making based on semantic categorization of environmental sounds

Auditory Pareidolia: Effects of Contextual Priming on Perceptions of Purportedly Paranormal and Ambiguous Auditory Stimuli

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