Organizational principles of multidimensional predictions in human auditory attention

Abstract

Anticipating the future rests upon our ability to exploit contextual cues and to formulate valid internal models or predictions. It is currently unknown how multiple predictions combine to bias perceptual information processing, and in particular whether this is determined by physiological constraints, behavioral relevance (task demands), or past knowledge (perceptual expertise). In a series of behavioral auditory experiments involving musical experts and non-musicians, we investigated the respective and combined contribution of temporal and spectral predictions in multiple detection tasks. We show that temporal and spectral predictions alone systematically increase perceptual sensitivity, independently of task demands or expertise. When combined, however, spectral predictions benefit more to non-musicians and dominate over temporal ones, and the extent of the spectrotemporal synergistic interaction depends on task demands. This suggests that the hierarchy of dominance primarily reflects the tonotopic organization of the auditory system and that expertise or attention only have a secondary modulatory influence.

Auditory local-global temporal processing: Evidence for perceptual reorganization with musical expertise

“…In line with a myriad of previous psychophysical works (see Wollman & Morillon, 2018), our study showed that musicians outperformed non-musicians in both local and global tasks (Figs. 2 and 3).…”

“…Lastly, the observed musicians vs. non-musicians differences could also be related to memory and attentional mechanisms. There is long-standing evidence for increased short-term auditory memory in musicians regarding pitch changes (Monahan et al 1987), and more generally, musical expertise is associated with enhanced pitch and time processing for both music and speech (Sares et al, 2018;Wollman & Morillon, 2018). Yet, if memory is at the basis of these differences, it is not clear whether these differences are related to the memory capacity itself or the way information is encoded.…”

“…to encode short melodies or to detect deviant tones (e.g. Lappe et al, 2008;Wollman et al, 2018). One can thus ask whether the auditory global precedence effect is modulated by perceptual expertise.…”

Incidental or Intentional? Different Brain Responses to One's Own Action Sounds in Hurdling vs. Tap Dancing

“…Notably, attention was found to reverse attenuation effects by predicted stimuli, leading to enhanced rather than attenuated responses (Reznik et al, 2015;Schröger et al, 2015a,b;Wollman and Morillon, 2018). If at all, we would have expected attention to be increased for GAS vs. BAS actions.…”

Irrelevant Predictions: Distractor Rhythmicity Modulates Neural Encoding in Auditory Cortex

“…Being able to anticipate when sounds will occur is extremely instrumental for actively guiding perception and attention, as put forth by Dynamic Attending Theory (Large and Jones 1999;Cason and Schön 2012;Brochard et al 2013;Cravo et al 2013;Jones 2019). Predictions stemming from temporal regularities within continuous sound sequences -such as isochronous or syncopated rhythmsare of particular interest since they need to be inferred from the stimulus itself, without explicit instructions (Escoffier et al 2015;Sohoglu and Chait 2016;Tal et al 2017;ten Oever et al 2017;Wollman and Morillon 2018). Rhythms are also prevalent in many natural stimuli such as speech, music and biological motion, making the ability to form and utilize temporal predictions ecologically relevant for real-life perception and attention (Haegens and Zion Golumbic 2018;Rimmele et al 2018).…”