scholarly journals Treefrogs exploit temporal coherence to form perceptual objects of communication signals

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. 20200573
Author(s):  
Saumya Gupta ◽  
Mark A. Bee
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Organization ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Temporal Coherence ◽  
Auditory Scene Analysis ◽  
Advertisement Calls ◽  
Communication Signals ◽  
Biologically Relevant ◽  
Perceptual Objects ◽  
Gestalt Laws ◽  
Auditory Objects

For many animals, navigating their environment requires an ability to organize continuous streams of sensory input into discrete ‘perceptual objects’ that correspond to physical entities in visual and auditory scenes. The human visual and auditory systems follow several Gestalt laws of perceptual organization to bind constituent features into coherent perceptual objects. A largely unexplored question is whether nonhuman animals follow similar Gestalt laws in perceiving behaviourally relevant stimuli, such as communication signals. We used females of Cope's grey treefrog ( Hyla chrysoscelis ) to test the hypothesis that temporal coherence—a powerful Gestalt principle in human auditory scene analysis—promotes perceptual binding in forming auditory objects of species-typical vocalizations. According to the principle of temporal coherence, sound elements that start and stop at the same time or that modulate coherently over time are likely to become bound together into the same auditory object. We found that the natural temporal coherence between two spectral components of advertisement calls promotes their perceptual binding into auditory objects of advertisement calls. Our findings confirm the broad ecological validity of temporal coherence as a Gestalt law of auditory perceptual organization guiding the formation of biologically relevant perceptual objects in animal behaviour.

scholarly journals Multistability, cross-modal binding and the additivity of conjoined grouping principles

2012 ◽  
Vol 367 (1591) ◽  
pp. 954-964 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Kubovy ◽  
Minhong Yu
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Perceptual Organization ◽  
Visual Binding ◽  
Gestalt Laws ◽  
Sceptical View

We present a sceptical view of multimodal multistability—drawing most of our examples from the relation between audition and vision. We begin by summarizing some of the principal ways in which audio-visual binding takes place. We review the evidence that unambiguous stimulation in one modality may affect the perception of a multistable stimulus in another modality. Cross-modal influences of one multistable stimulus on the multistability of another are different: they have occurred only in speech perception. We then argue that the strongest relation between perceptual organization in vision and perceptual organization in audition is likely to be by way of analogous Gestalt laws. We conclude with some general observations about multimodality.

Acoustic Features of Rhesus Vocalizations and Their Representation in the Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex

2007 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 1470-1484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yale E. Cohen ◽  
Frédéric Theunissen ◽  
Brian E. Russ ◽  
Patrick Gill
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Acoustic Properties ◽  
Acoustic Features ◽  
Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Communication Signals ◽  
First Order ◽  
Natural Stimuli ◽  
Spectrotemporal Receptive Field ◽  
Auditory Objects

Communication is one of the fundamental components of both human and nonhuman animal behavior. Auditory communication signals (i.e., vocalizations) are especially important in the socioecology of several species of nonhuman primates such as rhesus monkeys. In rhesus, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vPFC) is thought to be part of a circuit involved in representing vocalizations and other auditory objects. To further our understanding of the role of the vPFC in processing vocalizations, we characterized the spectrotemporal features of rhesus vocalizations, compared these features with other classes of natural stimuli, and then related the rhesus-vocalization acoustic features to neural activity. We found that the range of these spectrotemporal features was similar to that found in other ensembles of natural stimuli, including human speech, and identified the subspace of these features that would be particularly informative to discriminate between different vocalizations. In a first neural study, however, we found that the tuning properties of vPFC neurons did not emphasize these particularly informative spectrotemporal features. In a second neural study, we found that a first-order linear model (the spectrotemporal receptive field) is not a good predictor of vPFC activity. The results of these two neural studies are consistent with the hypothesis that the vPFC is not involved in coding the first-order acoustic properties of a stimulus but is involved in processing the higher-order information needed to form representations of auditory objects.

scholarly journals Functional brain networks underlying perceptual switching: auditory streaming and verbal transformations

2012 ◽  
Vol 367 (1591) ◽  
pp. 977-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Makio Kashino ◽  
Hirohito M. Kondo
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Organization ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Auditory Scene Analysis ◽  
Scene Analysis ◽  
Switching Frequency ◽  
Auditory Streaming ◽  
Auditory Scene ◽  
Functional Brain Networks ◽  
Fmri Analysis ◽  
Perceptual Changes

Recent studies have shown that auditory scene analysis involves distributed neural sites below, in, and beyond the auditory cortex (AC). However, it remains unclear what role each site plays and how they interact in the formation and selection of auditory percepts. We addressed this issue through perceptual multistability phenomena, namely, spontaneous perceptual switching in auditory streaming (AS) for a sequence of repeated triplet tones, and perceptual changes for a repeated word, known as verbal transformations (VTs). An event-related fMRI analysis revealed brain activity timelocked to perceptual switching in the cerebellum for AS, in frontal areas for VT, and the AC and thalamus for both. The results suggest that motor-based prediction, produced by neural networks outside the auditory system, plays essential roles in the segmentation of acoustic sequences both in AS and VT. The frequency of perceptual switching was determined by a balance between the activation of two sites, which are proposed to be involved in exploring novel perceptual organization and stabilizing current perceptual organization. The effect of the gene polymorphism of catechol- O -methyltransferase (COMT) on individual variations in switching frequency suggests that the balance of exploration and stabilization is modulated by catecholamines such as dopamine and noradrenalin. These mechanisms would support the noteworthy flexibility of auditory scene analysis.

scholarly journals Segregation of complex acoustic scenes based on temporal coherence

eLife ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sundeep Teki ◽  
Maria Chait ◽  
Sukhbinder Kumar ◽  
Shihab Shamma ◽  
Timothy D Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Organization ◽  
Temporal Coherence ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Organizational Principle ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Acoustic Environments ◽  
Observed Behavior

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.

scholarly journals Neural mechanisms of rhythmic masking release in monkey primary auditory cortex: implications for models of auditory scene analysis

2012 ◽  
Vol 107 (9) ◽  
pp. 2366-2382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yonatan I. Fishman ◽  
Christophe Micheyl ◽  
Mitchell Steinschneider
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Perceptual Organization ◽  
Primary Auditory Cortex ◽  
Auditory Scene Analysis ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Stream Segregation ◽  
Scene Analysis ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Masking Release ◽  
Auditory Scene

The ability to detect and track relevant acoustic signals embedded in a background of other sounds is crucial for hearing in complex acoustic environments. This ability is exemplified by a perceptual phenomenon known as “rhythmic masking release” (RMR). To demonstrate RMR, a sequence of tones forming a target rhythm is intermingled with physically identical “Distracter” sounds that perceptually mask the rhythm. The rhythm can be “released from masking” by adding “Flanker” tones in adjacent frequency channels that are synchronous with the Distracters. RMR represents a special case of auditory stream segregation, whereby the target rhythm is perceptually segregated from the background of Distracters when they are accompanied by the synchronous Flankers. The neural basis of RMR is unknown. Previous studies suggest the involvement of primary auditory cortex (A1) in the perceptual organization of sound patterns. Here, we recorded neural responses to RMR sequences in A1 of awake monkeys in order to identify neural correlates and potential mechanisms of RMR. We also tested whether two current models of stream segregation, when applied to these responses, could account for the perceptual organization of RMR sequences. Results suggest a key role for suppression of Distracter-evoked responses by the simultaneous Flankers in the perceptual restoration of the target rhythm in RMR. Furthermore, predictions of stream segregation models paralleled the psychoacoustics of RMR in humans. These findings reinforce the view that preattentive or “primitive” aspects of auditory scene analysis may be explained by relatively basic neural mechanisms at the cortical level.

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