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Abstract
In contrast to the complex acoustic environments we encounter everyday, most studies of auditory segregation have used relatively simple signals. Here, we synthesized a new stimulus to examine the detection of coherent patterns ('figures') from overlapping 'background' signals. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that human listeners are remarkably sensitive to the emergence of such figures and can tolerate a variety of spectral and temporal perturbations. This robust behavior is consistent with the existence of automatic auditory segregation mechanisms that are highly sensitive to correlations across frequency and time. The observed behavior cannot be explained purely on the basis of adaptation-based models used to explain the segregation of deterministic narrowband signals. We show that the present results are consistent with the predictions of a model of auditory perceptual organization based on temporal coherence. Our data thus support a role for temporal coherence as an organizational principle underlying auditory segregation. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00699.001.
Highlights
In our daily lives, we are constantly exposed to complex acoustic environments composed of multiple sound sources, for instance, while shopping in crowded markets or listening to an orchestra
Our results demonstrate that listeners are remarkably sensitive to the emergence of such figures (Figure 2) and can withstand a variety of stimulus manipulations designed to potentially disturb spectrotemporal integration (Figures 1B–E and 4)
We demonstrate fast detection with minimal training of a novel figure-from-ground stimulus comprising an overlapping figure and ground segment where, like natural stimuli, the figure has multiple components that are temporally coherent: they start and stop together
Summary
We are constantly exposed to complex acoustic environments composed of multiple sound sources, for instance, while shopping in crowded markets or listening to an orchestra. The most commonly used signal for probing auditory perceptual organization is a sequence of two pure tones alternating in time that, under certain conditions, can ‘stream’ or segregate into two sources (van Noorden, 1975; Bregman, 1990) Much work using these streaming signals has been carried out to elucidate the neural substrates and computations that underlie auditory segregation (Moore and Gockel, 2012; Snyder et al, 2012). For large frequency differences and fast presentation rates, which promote two distinct perceptual streams, they observed spatially segregated responses to the two tones This pattern of segregated cortical activation, proposed to underlie the streaming percept, has since been widely replicated (e.g., Bee and Klump, 2004; 2005; Micheyl et al, 2007a; Bidet-Caulet and Bertrand, 2009) and attributed to basic physiological principles of frequency selectivity, forward masking and neural adaptation (Fishman and Steinschneider, 2010a).
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