Owl's behavior and neural representation predicted by Bayesian inference

Fischer, Brian J.; Peña, José Luis

doi:10.1038/nn.2872

Cited by 127 publications

(270 citation statements)

References 34 publications

(68 reference statements)

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“…Such effects are relatively common in human vision, where priors have been characterized on orientation (45), speed (46), and contour shape (47). Similar approaches have recently proved fruitful in audition (48)(49)(50). The significance of the reverberation regularities we observed, along with their influence on perception, is that they suggest reverberation should be viewed as a scene analysis problem, comparable to the better-known cocktail party problem, rather than simply a source of distortion or noise.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Statistics of natural reverberation enable perceptual separation of sound and space

Traer

McDermott

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

126

130

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In everyday listening, sound reaches our ears directly from a source as well as indirectly via reflections known as reverberation. Reverberation profoundly distorts the sound from a source, yet humans can both identify sound sources and distinguish environments from the resulting sound, via mechanisms that remain unclear. The core computational challenge is that the acoustic signatures of the source and environment are combined in a single signal received by the ear. Here we ask whether our recognition of sound sources and spaces reflects an ability to separate their effects and whether any such separation is enabled by statistical regularities of real-world reverberation. To first determine whether such statistical regularities exist, we measured impulse responses (IRs) of 271 spaces sampled from the distribution encountered by humans during daily life. The sampled spaces were diverse, but their IRs were tightly constrained, exhibiting exponential decay at frequency-dependent rates: Mid frequencies reverberated longest whereas higher and lower frequencies decayed more rapidly, presumably due to absorptive properties of materials and air. To test whether humans leverage these regularities, we manipulated IR decay characteristics in simulated reverberant audio. Listeners could discriminate sound sources and environments from these signals, but their abilities degraded when reverberation characteristics deviated from those of real-world environments. Subjectively, atypical IRs were mistaken for sound sources. The results suggest the brain separates sound into contributions from the source and the environment, constrained by a prior on natural reverberation. This separation process may contribute to robust recognition while providing information about spaces around us.natural scene statistics | auditory scene analysis | environmental acoustics | psychophysics | psychoacoustics P erception requires the brain to determine the structure of the world from the energy that impinges upon our sensory receptors. One challenge is that most perceptual problems are illposed: The information we seek about the world is underdetermined given the sensory input. Sometimes this is because noise partially obscures the structure of interest. In other cases, it is because the sensory signal is influenced by multiple causal factors in the world. In vision, the light that enters the eye is a function of the surface pigmentation we typically need to estimate, but also of the illumination level. In touch, estimates of surface texture from vibrations are confounded by the speed with which a surface passes over the skin's receptors. And in hearing, we seek to understand the content of individual sound sources in the world, but the ear often receives a signal that is a mixture of multiple sources. These problems are all examples of scene analysis, in which the brain must infer one or more of the multiple factors that created the signals it receives (1). Inference in such cases is possible only with the aid of prior information about the world...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Statistics of natural reverberation enable perceptual separation of sound and space

Traer

McDermott

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

126

130

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“…Alternatively, it has been proposed that prior expectation might be encoded implicitly within the channel structure itself rather than through an explicit decoding stage (Fischer & Pena, 2011;Ganguli & Simoncelli, 2014). Take, for example, the perception of gaze direction, where there is a prior towards perceiving direct gaze (Mareschal et al, 2013b(Mareschal et al, , 2014.…”

Section: Structure Of the Representational Space For Person Perceptiomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While adaptation is generally considered to uncover the structure of the encoded representation of the stimulus dimensions under investigation, the Bayesian approach could be measuring either an expectation that is encoded within the channel structure (Fischer & Pena, 2011;Ganguli & Simoncelli, 2014) or one that becomes apparent not at the encoding but at a decoding stage (Zemel et al, 1998). A full investigation of the form of any biases measured should uncover more about the relationship between the underlying representation proposed via adaptation and that proposed by a Bayesian approach.…”

Section: Structure Of the Representational Space For Person Perceptiomentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bayesian approach to person perception

Clifford

Mareschal

Otsuka

et al. 2015

Consciousness and Cognition

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Here we propose a Bayesian approach to person perception, outlining the theoretical position and a methodological framework for testing the predictions experimentally. We use the term person perception to refer not only to the perception of others' personal attributes such as age and sex but also to the perception of social signals such as direction of gaze and emotional expression. The Bayesian approach provides a formal description of the way in which our perception combines current sensory evidence with prior expectations about the structure of the environment. Such expectations can lead to unconscious biases in our perception that are particularly evident when sensory evidence is uncertain. We illustrate the ideas with reference to our recent studies on gaze perception which show that people have a bias to perceive the gaze of others as directed towards themselves. We also describe a potential application to the study of the perception of a person's sex, in which a bias towards perceiving males is typically observed.

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“…According to this idea, the sensorimotor response is optimized to reduce overall endpoint variability (i.e., maximize precision) and mean localization error (maximizing accuracy), by accounting for the inherent noise in the neural processing pathways, uncertainty about the stimulus environment, and by using prior (learned, expected) information about potential target locations (Kording and Wolpert 2006;Fischer and Pena 2011). Since the spectral elevation cues are more complex than the robust binaural difference cues, and hence their processing more vulnerable to perturbation by noise, sensory uncertainty about elevation may be considered larger than for azimuth.…”

Section: Elevation Localizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-related Hearing Loss and Ear Morphology Affect Vertical but not Horizontal Sound-Localization Performance

Otte

Agterberg

Wanrooij

et al. 2013

JARO

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Several studies have attributed deterioration of sound localization in the horizontal (azimuth) and vertical (elevation) planes to an age-related decline in binaural processing and high-frequency hearing loss (HFHL). The latter might underlie decreased elevation performance of older adults. However, as the pinnae keep growing throughout life, we hypothesized that larger ears might enable older adults to localize sounds in elevation on the basis of lower frequencies, thus (partially) compensating their HFHL. In addition, it is not clear whether sound localization has already matured at a very young age, when the body is still growing, and the binaural and monaural sound-localization cues change accordingly. The present study investigated sound-localization performance of children (7-11 years), young adults (20-34 years), and older adults (63-80 years) under open-loop conditions in the two-dimensional frontal hemifield. We studied the effect of age-related hearing loss and ear size on localization responses to brief broadband sound bursts with different bandwidths. We found similar localization abilities in azimuth for all listeners, including the older adults with HFHL. Sound localization in elevation for the children and young adult listeners with smaller ears improved when stimuli contained frequencies above 7 kHz. Subjects with larger ears could also judge the elevation of sound sources restricted to lower frequency content. Despite increasing ear size, sound localization in elevation deteriorated in older adults with HFHL. We conclude that the binaural localization cues are successfully used well into later stages of life, but that pinna growth cannot compensate the more profound HFHL with age.

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Owl's behavior and neural representation predicted by Bayesian inference

Cited by 127 publications

References 34 publications

Statistics of natural reverberation enable perceptual separation of sound and space

Statistics of natural reverberation enable perceptual separation of sound and space

A Bayesian approach to person perception

Age-related Hearing Loss and Ear Morphology Affect Vertical but not Horizontal Sound-Localization Performance

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