Perceptual anchoring to auditory textures in human listeners

Abstract

Learning is crucial for the development of species, enabling them to acquire behaviours, accumulate knowledge, and refine skills. An example of implicit and unsupervised learning is “perceptual anchoring,” where the brain creates an internal representation of the statistical properties of a stimulus that it encounters repeatedly. Behaviourally, both recognition and discrimination of the repeated stimulus i.e., the anchor, increases over time. Here, we modified a white noise anchoring paradigm (Agus et al., 2014) to incorporate synthetic auditory textures (McDermott et al., 2013). Four sound textures recordings were used in this study: wind blowing, crackling fire, insects, and bubbling water. Normal hearers identified if two synthetic auditory textures were identical. Participants encountered three blocks of 80 trials per synthetic texture: 20 Fixed-Repeated (two identical excerpts within and across trials), 20 Repeated (two identical excerpts within the trial but never heard again) and 40 Novel (two different excerpts presented within and across trials). Anchoring to the Fixed-Repeated stimuli was observed in all participants. Sensitivity to the Fixed-Repeated stimulus was always significantly higher than to the Repeated stimuli for all textures individually and when collapsed. Here, we demonstrated that synthetized auditory textures are suitable to assess perceptual anchoring in human listeners.