Abstract
Sensory cortical mechanisms combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects. This is difficult in noisy or cluttered environments. Knowing that individuals vary greatly in their susceptibility to clutter, we wondered whether there might be a relation between an individual’s auditory and visual susceptibilities to clutter. In auditory masking, background sound makes spoken words unrecognizable. When masking arises due to interference at central auditory processing stages, beyond the cochlea, it is called informational masking. A strikingly similar phenomenon in vision, called visual crowding, occurs when nearby clutter makes a target object unrecognizable, despite being resolved at the retina. We here compare susceptibilities to auditory informational masking and visual crowding in the same participants. Surprisingly, across participants, we find a negative correlation (R = –0.7) between susceptibility to informational masking and crowding: Participants who have low susceptibility to auditory clutter tend to have high susceptibility to visual clutter, and vice versa. This reveals a tradeoff in the brain between auditory and visual processing.
Highlights
Sensory cortical mechanisms combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects
Hearing-impaired individuals often misunderstand speech in the presence of background sound. This occurs because the same neurons in the auditory nerve respond to both the target of interest and the background sound, swamping target information, a phenomenon known as energetic masking
The critical-band signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) fails to predict the drop in speech intelligibility that occurs when the background sound is made perceptually similar to the target sound
Summary
Sensory cortical mechanisms combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects. A strikingly similar phenomenon in vision, called visual crowding, occurs when nearby clutter makes a target object unrecognizable, despite being resolved at the retina. Hearing-impaired individuals often misunderstand speech in the presence of background sound This occurs because the same neurons in the auditory nerve respond to both the target of interest and the background sound, swamping target information, a phenomenon known as energetic masking. Unlike that noise, a background sound that is perceptually similar to the target can make words unintelligible even when its spectrum is non-overlapping[5]. This second difficulty with background sound is attributed to the central auditory phenomenon called Informational Masking (IM)[6]. Background sound informationally masks a target that is too perceptually similar to the Scientific Reports | (2021) 11:23540
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
