Sound segregation via embedded repetition is robust to inattention.

Masutomi, Keiko; Barascud, Nicolas; Kashino, Makio; McDermott, Josh H.; Chait, Maria

doi:10.1037/xhp0000147

Cited by 26 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 96 publications

(145 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Participants were naive to the nature of the distracting REG or RAND patterns, and focused on a different task. A change-detection task, rather than a visual task similar to that in the EEG experiment, was chosen because: (i) its rapid nature allowed us to probe behaviour more frequently, and hence efficiently; and (ii) a competing auditory (rather than a visual) task is more likely to reveal effects of distraction, because it poses more competition for shared resources (see review in [70,71]). It is therefore unlikely that failure to observe effects of attentional capture is due to the difference in task per se .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Southwell

Anna

Cécile

et al. 2017

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

112

168

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this series of behavioural and electroencephalography (EEG) experiments, we investigate the extent to which repeating patterns of sounds capture attention. Work in the visual domain has revealed attentional capture by statistically predictable stimuli, consistent with predictive coding accounts which suggest that attention is drawn to sensory regularities. Here, stimuli comprised rapid sequences of tone pips, arranged in regular (REG) or random (RAND) patterns. EEG data demonstrate that the brain rapidly recognizes predictable patterns manifested as a rapid increase in responses to REG relative to RAND sequences. This increase is reminiscent of the increase in gain on neural responses to attended stimuli often seen in the neuroimaging literature, and thus consistent with the hypothesis that predictable sequences draw attention. To study potential attentional capture by auditory regularities, we used REG and RAND sequences in two different behavioural tasks designed to reveal effects of attentional capture by regularity. Overall, the pattern of results suggests that regularity does not capture attention.This article is part of the themed issue ‘Auditory and visual scene analysis’.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Southwell

Anna

Cécile

et al. 2017

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

112

168

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Listeners are sensitive to repeating sound patterns, even when they are embedded in rapid sequences (20)(21)(22)(23)(24). Here we describe a series of behavioral and brain imaging experiments in which we sought to understand the processes through which such regularities are detected by the brain.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain responses in humans reveal ideal observer-like sensitivity to complex acoustic patterns

Barascud

Pearce

Griffiths

et al. 2016

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

Self Cite

254

445

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We use behavioral methods, magnetoencephalography, and functional MRI to investigate how human listeners discover temporal patterns and statistical regularities in complex sound sequences. Sensitivity to patterns is fundamental to sensory processing, in particular in the auditory system, because most auditory signals only have meaning as successions over time. Previous evidence suggests that the brain is tuned to the statistics of sensory stimulation. However, the process through which this arises has been elusive. We demonstrate that listeners are remarkably sensitive to the emergence of complex patterns within rapidly evolving sound sequences, performing on par with an ideal observer model. Brain responses reveal online processes of evidence accumulationdynamic changes in tonic activity precisely correlate with the expected precision or predictability of ongoing auditory input-both in terms of deterministic (first-order) structure and the entropy of random sequences. Source analysis demonstrates an interaction between primary auditory cortex, hippocampus, and inferior frontal gyrus in the process of discovering the regularity within the ongoing sound sequence. The results are consistent with precision based predictive coding accounts of perceptual inference and provide compelling neurophysiological evidence of the brain's capacity to encode high-order temporal structure in sensory signals.A ccumulating work suggests that the brain is sensitive to statistical regularities in sensory input, at multiple time scales (1-9). The auditory system has been a useful testbed to investigate these processes (2, 3, 9-13), largely due to the vantage point provided by the mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm (12, 13). The MMN is an auditory-evoked response generated by sounds violating some regular aspect of the prior sequence and is hypothesized to reflect a discrepancy between the memory trace, or expectations, generated by the standard stimulus, and the deviant information (12,13). A large body of MMN work has demonstrated that listeners are sensitive to the violation of a variety of acoustic sequences, including very complex regularities (14, 15), and interpreted as indirect evidence for exquisite sensitivity to patterns in sound.Due to the physical constraints that characterize animate objects in the environment, sounds emanating from those sources are usually statistically regular and often repetitive (e.g., flapping wings and locomotion sounds). The ability to discover regularities within the sensory input is therefore a critical aspect of scene analysis: providing the anchor that enables an observer to identify and track a behaviorally relevant signal from within the brouhaha of a busy scene. Detecting temporally recurrent auditory features enables listeners to recognize auditory objects (because most auditory signals only have meaning as patterns over time), but also to form rules, or models, that characterize the past and expected behavior of objects within the environment (4, 16). Indeed, experimental work demonstrat...

show abstract

“…The issue of whether different modalities draw on separate, independent resource pools or are shared across a single, central pool accessible to all sensory modalities has been a central question in cognitive neuroscience (e.g. Duncan et al., 1997, Larsen et al., 2003, Alais et al., 2006, Kreitz et al., 2015) that has yielded mixed findings (Dyson et al., 2005, Muller-Gass et al., 2005, Talsma et al., 2006, Rees et al., 2001, Sculthorpe et al., 2008, Restuccia et al., 2005, Otten et al., 2000, Müller et al., 2002, Parks et al., 2011, Chait et al., 2012, Salmela et al., 2014, Raveh and Lavie, 2015, Molloy et al., 2015, Masutomi et al., 2016). For example, Rees et al., 1997, Rees et al., 2001 showed that visual load, but not auditory load, modulates processing of a task-irrelevant visual motion stimulus.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of distraction on change detection in crowded acoustic scenes

Petsas¹,

Harrison²,

Kashino³

et al. 2016

Hearing Research

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this series of behavioural experiments we investigated the effect of distraction on the maintenance of acoustic scene information in short-term memory. Stimuli are artificial acoustic ‘scenes’ composed of several (up to twelve) concurrent tone-pip streams (‘sources’). A gap (1000 ms) is inserted partway through the ‘scene’; Changes in the form of an appearance of a new source or disappearance of an existing source, occur after the gap in 50% of the trials. Listeners were instructed to monitor the unfolding ‘soundscapes’ for these events. Distraction was measured by presenting distractor stimuli during the gap. Experiments 1 and 2 used a dual task design where listeners were required to perform a task with varying attentional demands (‘High Demand’ vs. ‘Low Demand’) on brief auditory (Experiment 1a) or visual (Experiment 1b) signals presented during the gap. Experiments 2 and 3 required participants to ignore distractor sounds and focus on the change detection task. Our results demonstrate that the maintenance of scene information in short-term memory is influenced by the availability of attentional and/or processing resources during the gap, and that this dependence appears to be modality specific. We also show that these processes are susceptible to bottom up driven distraction even in situations when the distractors are not novel, but occur on each trial. Change detection performance is systematically linked with the, independently determined, perceptual salience of the distractor sound. The findings also demonstrate that the present task may be a useful objective means for determining relative perceptual salience.

show abstract

Sound segregation via embedded repetition is robust to inattention.

Cited by 26 publications

References 96 publications

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

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

Brain responses in humans reveal ideal observer-like sensitivity to complex acoustic patterns

The effect of distraction on change detection in crowded acoustic scenes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About