Abstract
Perception adapts to the properties of prior stimulation, as illustrated by phenomena such as visual color constancy or speech context effects. In the auditory domain, only little is known about adaptive processes when it comes to the attribute of auditory brightness. Here, we report an experiment that tests whether listeners adapt to spectral colorations imposed on naturalistic music and speech excerpts. Our results indicate consistent contrastive adaptation of auditory brightness judgments on a trial-by-trial basis. The pattern of results suggests that these effects tend to grow with an increase in the duration of the adaptor context but level off after around 8 trials of 2 s duration. A simple model of the response criterion yields a correlation of r = .97 with the measured data and corroborates the notion that brightness perception adapts on timescales that fall in the range of auditory short-term memory. Effects turn out to be similar for spectral filtering based on linear spectral filter slopes and filtering based on a measured transfer function from a commercially available hearing device. Overall, our findings demonstrate the adaptivity of auditory brightness perception under realistic acoustical conditions.
Highlights
Perception adapts to the properties of prior stimulation, as illustrated by phenomena such as visual color constancy or speech context effects
In order to achieve a broad range of experimental conditions, we extended the morph level to negative values up to −0.5, and positive values to 1.5, which allowed to overemphasize the acoustical differences between the two transfer functions in one or the other direction
We have reported a set of experiments that indicate consistent adaptation effects of auditory brightness judgments for naturalistic music and speech excerpts
Summary
Perception adapts to the properties of prior stimulation, as illustrated by phenomena such as visual color constancy or speech context effects. An important auditory attribute that can be directly affected by spectral coloration is auditory brightness The latter depends on the balance of low to high frequency energy in a sound and constitutes a central component of a sound’s timbre[1,2,3,4]. Studies by Holt[5] showed that the categorization of sounds along a /ga/–/da/ continuum, for instance, is affected by the statistical distribution of non-adjacent, non-speech context sounds, suggesting a general auditory mechanism of spectral contrast enhancement. Representations of sound level have been shown to be subject to adaptation over time[22] Together these findings suggest that even the computation of elementary auditory attributes features aspects of recalibration according to the statistics of sensory signals encountered in the recent past. In a study on sound texture discrimination, effects of temporal integration were observed within a single t rial[24]
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