Putting the Tritone Paradox into Context: Insights from Neural Population Decoding and Human Psychophysics

Englitz, Bernhard; Akram, Sahar; David, Stephen V.; Chambers, Claire; Pressnitzer, Daniel; Depireux, Didier A.; Fritz, Jonathan B.; Shamma, Shihab A.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-1590-9_18

Cited by 4 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…In speech perception, they are often described as “coarticulatory effects” in which preceding sounds influence strongly the perception of current syllables and phonemes. Other dramatic examples of contextual effects that induce their effects over relatively long periods of time (necessitating a model of short-term memory) include the Shepherd tone percepts and contrast enhancement [41]. A final example is the active engagement of infants in perceiving their linguistic environment and adapting to the statistics of the phonemes of their mother tongue [42].…”

Section: Rapid Cortical Plasticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive auditory computations

Shamma

Fritz

2014

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

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The auditory system analyses acoustic signals, extracting their perceptual attributes, and exploiting them to navigate complex auditory environments. While many of the basic transformations that give rise to the early auditory representations are well studied and understood, little is known about the latter cognitive functions that bind, organize, and give meaning to them. They include the ability to attend to, segregate, and track one of many sound sources, to learn its identity, commit it to memory, robustly recognize it, and utilize it to make decisions. This review hints at the profound adaptive influences and contextual effects induced by cognitive functions during these behaviors, and the need for robust tractable mathematical models to understand them.

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Section: Rapid Cortical Plasticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive auditory computations

Shamma

Fritz

2014

Current Opinion in Neurobiology

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“…In the present work, we develop a neuronal network model to explain the context effects on directional perception (i.e., ascending vs. descending steps in pitch), one of the basic relationships for binding successive tones. The model draws inspiration from recent work (Englitz et al, 2013 ) about the influence of preceding stimuli on directional perception of artificially designed ambiguous tone pairs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The psychophysical experiments (Repp, 1997 ; Englitz et al, 2013 ) adopt Shepard tones, each of which consists of multiple simultaneous octave-spaced pure tones (Figure 1A ). A Shepard tone with many frequency components is approximately spectrally periodic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Repp, 1997 Experiment 3) found that a single Shepard tone before a tritone pair influences the perceived pitch change direction. A few preceding Shepard tones with PC between the tritone pair can strongly bias the perception toward the direction from the first (T 1 ) to the second tone (T 2 )—ascending if the sequence is within the half-octave interval above T 1 , and vice versa if below T 1 (Englitz et al, 2013 , see Figure 18.1D; Chambers and Pressnitzer, 2011 ) (Figures 1B,C ; for details see Materials and Methods, see Supplementary Material for audio demonstrations).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(C) Steps of 0–6 st from T 1 (tones at the right half of the pitch class circle) are perceived as ascending while steps of -6–0 st (tones at the left half circle) are perceived as descending (Shepard, 1964 ; Chambers and Pressnitzer, 2014 ). Up bias tones bias the perception of the ambiguous tritone pair (T 1 and T 2 ) toward ascending while Down bias tones bias toward descending (Englitz et al, 2013 , Figure 18.1D , see Supplementary Material for audio demonstrations). [ A,B are modified from Englitz et al ( 2013 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A neuronal network model for context-dependence of pitch change perception

Huang

Englitz

Shamma

et al. 2015

Front. Comput. Neurosci.

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Many natural stimuli have perceptual ambiguities that can be cognitively resolved by the surrounding context. In audition, preceding context can bias the perception of speech and non-speech stimuli. Here, we develop a neuronal network model that can account for how context affects the perception of pitch change between a pair of successive complex tones. We focus especially on an ambiguous comparison—listeners experience opposite percepts (either ascending or descending) for an ambiguous tone pair depending on the spectral location of preceding context tones. We developed a recurrent, firing-rate network model, which detects frequency-change-direction of successively played stimuli and successfully accounts for the context-dependent perception demonstrated in behavioral experiments. The model consists of two tonotopically organized, excitatory populations, Eup and Edown, that respond preferentially to ascending or descending stimuli in pitch, respectively. These preferences are generated by an inhibitory population that provides inhibition asymmetric in frequency to the two populations; context dependence arises from slow facilitation of inhibition. We show that contextual influence depends on the spectral distribution of preceding tones and the tuning width of inhibitory neurons. Further, we demonstrate, using phase-space analysis, how the facilitated inhibition from previous stimuli and the waning inhibition from the just-preceding tone shape the competition between the Eup and Edown populations. In sum, our model accounts for contextual influences on the pitch change perception of an ambiguous tone pair by introducing a novel decoding strategy based on direction-selective units. The model's network architecture and slow facilitating inhibition emerge as predictions of neuronal mechanisms for these perceptual dynamics. Since the model structure does not depend on the specific stimuli, we show that it generalizes to other contextual effects and stimulus types.

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Aftereffects of Spectrally Similar and Dissimilar Spectral Motion Adaptors in the Tritone Paradox

Malek

Sperschneider

2018

Front. Psychol.

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Shepard tones consist of octave-spaced components, whose amplitudes are generated under a fixed bell-shaped spectral envelope. They are well defined in pitch chroma, but generate octave confusions that in turn can produce ambiguities in the perceived relative pitch heights when their chromas are exactly a tritone apart (the tritone paradox). This study examined the effects of tonal context on relative pitch height judgments using adaptor sequences followed by target sequences (pairs of Shepard tones of different chromas separated by a tritone). Listeners judged whether the second target Shepard tone was higher or lower than the first. Adaptor sequences consisted of rising or falling scales (43 s at the beginning of each block, 4 s before each target sequence). Two sets of Shepard tones were used for adaptors and targets that were generated under spectral envelopes centered at either A3 (220 Hz) and C6 (1,046 Hz). Pitch direction judgments (rising vs. falling) to spectrally consistent (A3–A3, C6–C6) and inconsistent (A3–C6, C6–A3) adaptor-target combinations were studied. Large significant contrastive aftereffects (0.08–0.21 change in fraction of pitch direction responses) were only found for the Shepard tones that were judged as higher in the control condition (judgments about the target sequences without adaptor sequences) for the consistent adaptor-target conditions (A3–A3, C6–C6). The experiments rule out explanations based on non-sensory decision making processes. Possible explanations in terms of perceptual aftereffects caused by adaptation in central auditory frequency-motion detectors are discussed.

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Putting the Tritone Paradox into Context: Insights from Neural Population Decoding and Human Psychophysics

Cited by 4 publications

References 8 publications

Adaptive auditory computations

Adaptive auditory computations

A neuronal network model for context-dependence of pitch change perception

Aftereffects of Spectrally Similar and Dissimilar Spectral Motion Adaptors in the Tritone Paradox

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