“Change Deafness” Arising from Inter-feature Masking within a Single Auditory Object

Abstract

Our ability to detect prominent changes in complex acoustic scenes depends not only on the ear's sensitivity, but also on the capacity of the brain to process competing incoming information. Here, employing a combination of psychophysics and magnetoencephalography (MEG), we investigate listeners' sensitivity in situations when two features belonging to the same auditory object change in close succession. The auditory object under investigation is a sequence of tone pips characterized by a regularly-repeating frequency pattern. Signals consisted of an initial, regularlyalternating sequence of three short (60 ms) pure-tone pips (in the form ABCABC…..) followed by a long pure tone with a frequency that is either expected based on the on-going regular pattern ('LONG expected -i.e. 'LONG-expected') or constitutes a pattern violation ('LONGunexpected'). The change in LONG-expected is manifest as a change in duration (when the long pure-tone exceeds the established duration of a tone pip), whilst the change in LONG-unexpected is manifest as a change in both the frequency pattern and a change in the duration. Our results reveal a form of 'change deafness', in that whilst changes in both the frequency pattern and the expected duration appear to be processed effectively by the auditory system -cortical signatures of both changes are evident in the MEG data -listeners often fail to detect changes in the frequency pattern when that change is closely followed by a change in duration. By systematically manipulating the properties of the changing features and measuring behavioural and MEG responses, we demonstrate that feature changes within the same auditory object, which occur close together in time, appear to compete for perceptual resources. Keywordsauditory evoked response; magnetoencephalography; MEG; auditory cortex; change detection; edge detection; scene analysis; attentional blink; informational masking Survival often depends on the ability to respond promptly and effectively to new events in the environment. In many cases (e.g. in busy, dynamic surroundings, or beyond the field of vision) such events are primarily detected as changes in acoustic input, and the auditory system is commonly thought to possess specialized, highly-tuned mechanisms for detecting

Change deafness, dual-task performance, and domain-specific expertise

“…Attending to both resulted in decreased change detection performance. Previous work has suggested a model of limited cognitive and perceptual resources underlying change deafness effects (Barascud et al, 2014;Vitevitch & Donoso, 2011). Our results are consistent with this view.…”

Adaptive efficient coding of correlated acoustic properties

“…Transition probability in sound sequences is encoded in higher auditory forebrain of songbirds (Lu and Vicario, 2014). Studies of mismatch negativity (MMN) have demonstrated that the brain can detect the violation of acoustic sequences, even when the embedded patterns were very complex (Paavilainen et al, 2007, Barascud et al, 2014. Detection of acoustic regularities activates a network including A1, and higher auditory cortex, hippocampus, and inferior frontal gyrus (Barascud et a., 2016).…”

Is predictability salient? A study of attentional capture by auditory patterns

“…Such expectations improve behavioural performance in predictable contexts; for example, by orienting resources to a point in time when a stimulus is expected [21], or by facilitating selective attention and segregation of concurrent sound streams [10,22–24]. In addition, recognition of regularities can aid detection of changes in the environment, which causes sensory input that is in disagreement with these predictions [9,25,26]. It has been proposed that the same predictive mechanisms underlie both the detection of regularity violations and auditory scene analysis [20,25].…”