Abstract
Behavioral and neural studies of selective attention have consistently demonstrated that explicit attentional cues to particular perceptual features profoundly alter perception and performance. The statistics of the sensory environment can also provide cues about what perceptual features to expect, but the extent to which these more implicit contextual cues impact perception and performance, as well as their relationship to explicit attentional cues, is not well understood. In this study, the explicit cues, or attentional prior probabilities, and the implicit cues, or contextual prior probabilities, associated with different acoustic frequencies in a detection task were simultaneously manipulated. Both attentional and contextual priors had similarly large but independent impacts on sound detectability, with evidence that listeners tracked and used contextual priors for a variety of sound classes (pure tones, harmonic complexes, and vowels). Further analyses showed that listeners updated their contextual priors rapidly and optimally, given the changing acoustic frequency statistics inherent in the paradigm. A Bayesian Observer model accounted for both attentional and contextual adaptations found with listeners. These results bolster the interpretation of perception as Bayesian inference, and suggest that some effects attributed to selective attention may be a special case of contextual prior integration along a feature axis.
Highlights
Perception of our surrounds is not merely a reflection of sensory information instantly gathered from the environment
Detection accuracies significantly declined with decreasing probe probability [Main effect of probe probability: F2,70 = 25.46, P < 0.0001; Individual cohorts, Group 1, F2,28 = 13.15, P < 0.001; Group 2, F2, 22 = 5.55, P < 0.05; Group 3, F2,16 = 9.22, P < 0.01] (Fig 2b), indicating that short-term statistics associated with tone frequency were tracked by listeners, and sensitivity to different tone frequencies adapted according to prior probability
There was no significant interaction between probe distance and probe probability [F4,56 = 0.56, P = 0.69; Individual cohorts, Group 1, F4,56 = 0.03, P = .99; Group 2, F4, 44 = 0.52, P = 0.72; Group 3, F4,32 = 1.68, P = 0.18], suggesting that tone sensitivities were modulated by the collection of tone frequency priors independently from selective attention to the cued frequency
Summary
Perception of our surrounds is not merely a reflection of sensory information instantly gathered from the environment. Explicit attentional cues can rapidly enhance perception of expected events (e.g. a specific color [1] or frequency region [2]) and remarkably, leave many observers virtually blind or deaf to unexpected visual or acoustic events [3,4]. These examples all involve manipulating the observers’ expectations explicitly: attend to a specific color, location in space, tone frequency, a female voice, etc.
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