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Abstract
Author SummaryThe brain has a robust ability to process sensory stimuli, even when those stimuli are warped in time. The most prominent example of such perceptual robustness occurs in speech communication. Rates of speech can be highly variable both within and across speakers, yet our perceptions of words remain stable. The neuronal mechanisms that subserve invariance to time warping without compromising our ability to discriminate between fine temporal cues have puzzled neuroscientists for several decades. Here, we describe a cellular process whereby auditory neurons recalibrate, on the fly, their perceptual clocks and allows them effectively to correct for temporal fluctuations in the rate of incoming sensory events. We demonstrate that this basic biophysical mechanism allows simple neural architectures to solve a standard benchmark speech-recognition task with near perfect performance. This proposed mechanism for time-warp–invariant neural processing leads to novel hypotheses about the origin of speech perception pathologies.
Highlights
Robustness of neuronal information processing to temporal warping of natural stimuli poses a difficult computational challenge to the brain [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Changes in speaking rate in ongoing natural speech introduce temporal warping of the acoustic signal on a scale of hundreds of milliseconds, encompassing temporal distortions of acoustic cues that range from 2-fold compression to 2-fold dilation [14,15]
We describe a cellular process whereby auditory neurons recalibrate, on the fly, their perceptual clocks and allows them effectively to correct for temporal fluctuations in the rate of incoming sensory events. We demonstrate that this basic biophysical mechanism allows simple neural architectures to solve a standard benchmark speech-recognition task with near perfect performance
Summary
Robustness of neuronal information processing to temporal warping of natural stimuli poses a difficult computational challenge to the brain [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. This is true for auditory stimuli, which often carry perceptually relevant information in fine differences between temporal cues [10,11]. It has long been demonstrated that speech perception in humans normalizes durations of temporal cues to the rate of speech [2,16,17,18], the neural mechanisms underlying this perceptual constancy have remained mysterious
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