Abstract
The auditory system is able to recognize auditory objects and is thought to form predictive models of them even though the acoustic information arriving at our ears is often imperfect, intermixed, or distorted. We investigated implicit regularity extraction for acoustically intact versus disrupted six-tone sound patterns via event-related potentials (ERPs). In an exact-repetition condition, identical patterns were repeated; in two distorted-repetition conditions, one randomly chosen segment in each sound pattern was replaced either by white noise or by a wrong pitch. In a roving-standard paradigm, sound patterns were repeated 1–12 times (standards) in a row before a new pattern (deviant) occurred. The participants were not informed about the roving rule and had to detect rarely occurring loudness changes. Behavioral detectability of pattern changes was assessed in a subsequent behavioral task. Pattern changes (standard vs. deviant) elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a, and were behaviorally detected above the chance level in all conditions, suggesting that the auditory system extracts regularities despite distortions in the acoustic input. However, MMN and P3a amplitude were decreased by distortions. At the level of MMN, both types of distortions caused similar impairments, suggesting that auditory regularity extraction is largely determined by the stimulus statistics of matching information. At the level of P3a, wrong-pitch distortions caused larger decreases than white-noise distortions. Wrong-pitch distortions likely prevented the engagement of restoration mechanisms and the segregation of disrupted from true pattern segments, causing stronger informational interference with the relevant pattern information.
Highlights
Acoustic information, which arrives at ours ears and informs us about objects in the outer world, is often imperfect
We demonstrated that the auditory system is able to form pattern representations and predictions even in the context of uncertainty
mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a were elicited in response to deviants in all conditions at similar latency estimations
Summary
Acoustic information, which arrives at ours ears and informs us about objects in the outer world, is often imperfect. On the one hand, our auditory system is able to detect even slight variations in the acoustic input. We need to neglect input variation that is irrelevant for the current task or we need to compensate for missing or distorted information. Mechanisms of perceptual prediction and restoration help us to fill in and reconstruct occluded or obscured information. This occurs in the visual world (e.g., in the case of the blind spot; Walls, 1954; Ramachandran, 1992; De Weerd, 2006; Spillmann et al, 2006) and in the auditory domain. The listener perceives the missing information, suggesting that the auditory system predicts and interpolates through the absent information (Warren et al, 1997; Micheyl et al, 2003; Riecke et al, 2007; Shahin et al, 2009; Bendixen et al, 2014)
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