Common Principles in Auditory and Visual Processing

Abstract

The perception of sound involves a complex array of attributes and processes, ranging from the sensation of timber and pitch, to the localization and fusion of sound sources. Computational strategies proposed to describe these phenomena have emphasised temporal features in the representation of sound in the auditory system. This is in contrast to visual processing where spatial features, such as edges and peaks, play a critical role in defining the image. These divergent views of auditory and visual processing have led to the conclusion that the underlying neural networks must be quite different. Recent experimental findings from the peripheral and central auditory system, however, reveal intricate spatiotemporal neural response patterns and a multitude of spatial cues that can encode the acoustic stimulus. These results suggest a unified computational framework, and hence shared neural network architectures, for central auditory and visual processing. Specifically, we demonstrate how three fundamental concepts in visual processing play an analogous role in auditory processing and perception. These are: lateral inhibition for sound spectral estimation, edge orientation and direction of motion sensitivity for timbre perception, and stereopsis for binaural processing.