Abstract
Auditory perception depends on the temporal structure of incoming acoustic stimuli. Here, we examined whether a temporal manipulation that affects the perceptual grouping also affects the time dependence of decisions regarding those stimuli. We designed a novel discrimination task that required human listeners to decide whether a sequence of tone bursts was increasing or decreasing in frequency. We manipulated temporal perceptual-grouping cues by changing the time interval between the tone bursts, which led to listeners hearing the sequences as a single sound for short intervals or discrete sounds for longer intervals. Despite these strong perceptual differences, this manipulation did not affect the efficiency of how auditory information was integrated over time to form a decision. Instead, the grouping manipulation affected subjects' speed-accuracy trade-offs. These results indicate that the temporal dynamics of evidence accumulation for auditory perceptual decisions can be invariant to manipulations that affect the perceptual grouping of the evidence.
Highlights
Auditory perception depends on both perceptual grouping and decision-making
We examined the relationship between auditory perceptual grouping and decision-making
Does the temporal manipulation of a stream of acoustic events, which affects its perceptual grouping (Bregman, 1990), affect decisions about its identity? We found that the time interval between sequentially presented tone bursts had eNeuro.sfn.org strong effects on whether the tone bursts were perceptually grouped as a single sound or heard as discrete sounds (Fig. 3)
Summary
Auditory perception depends on perceptual grouping cues, which relate to how the brain parses the auditory scene into distinct perceptual units, and auditory decisions, which relate to how the brain identifies a sound. These two processes are not independent; both rely on the temporal structure of the acoustic stimulus. We combined psychophysical testing with computational modeling to test the interaction of temporal perceptual grouping cues with the temporal processes that underlie perceptual decisionmaking. We found that temporal grouping cues do not affect the efficiency by which sensory evidence is accumulated to form a decision. The grouping cues modulate a subject’s speedϪaccuracy trade-off
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