Abstract
Salience describes the phenomenon by which an object stands out from a scene. While its underlying processes are extensively studied in vision, mechanisms of auditory salience remain largely unknown. Previous studies have used well-controlled auditory scenes to shed light on some of the acoustic attributes that drive the salience of sound events. Unfortunately, the use of constrained stimuli in addition to a lack of well-established benchmarks of salience judgments hampers the development of comprehensive theories of sensory-driven auditory attention. The present study explores auditory salience in a set of dynamic natural scenes. A behavioral measure of salience is collected by having human volunteers listen to two concurrent scenes and indicate continuously which one attracts their attention. By using natural scenes, the study takes a data-driven rather than experimenter-driven approach to exploring the parameters of auditory salience. The findings indicate that the space of auditory salience is multidimensional (spanning loudness, pitch, spectral shape, as well as other acoustic attributes), nonlinear and highly context-dependent. Importantly, the results indicate that contextual information about the entire scene over both short and long scales needs to be considered in order to properly account for perceptual judgments of salience.
Highlights
The brain has to sort through the flood of sensory information impinging on its senses at every instance and put the spotlight on a fraction of this information that is relevant to a behavioral goal
We present a database of diverse natural acoustic scenes with a goal to facilitate the study and modeling of auditory salience
In the context of auditory events, the concept of contrast is applicable in the temporal dimension, whereby as sounds evolve over time, a change from a low to a high value of an acoustic attribute may induce a pop-out effect of the sound event at that moment
Summary
Attention is at the center of any study of sensory information processing in the brain. It describes mechanisms by which the brain focuses both sensory and cognitive resources on important elements in the stimulus. Intuitively, the brain has to sort through the flood of sensory information impinging on its senses at every instance and put the spotlight on a fraction of this information that is relevant to a behavioral goal. That is certainly the case for speech sounds, certain melodies (for subjects who are musicians or music-lovers) as well as other familiar sounds While this is an aspect that again complicates the study of auditory salience for subsets of listeners, the use of a large pool of volunteers will highlight the behavior of average listeners, leaving the focus on specific sounds of interest as a follow-up analysis. It is the complex interactions in a realistic setting that limits the translation of salience models developed in the laboratory to real applications. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of Nicholas Huang and Mounya Elhilali these findings to studies of bottom-up attention and auditory perception of natural soundscapes
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