Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles

Events and objects in the world must be inferred from sensory signals to support behavior. Because sensory signals are transduced with measurements that are temporally and spatially local, the estimation of a particular object or event can be viewed as the result of grouping th...

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Main Authors: Mlynarski, Wiktor, McDermott, Josh
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Cognitive Computational Neuroscience 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137976
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author Mlynarski, Wiktor
McDermott, Josh
author2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
author_facet Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Mlynarski, Wiktor
McDermott, Josh
author_sort Mlynarski, Wiktor
collection MIT
description Events and objects in the world must be inferred from sensory signals to support behavior. Because sensory signals are transduced with measurements that are temporally and spatially local, the estimation of a particular object or event can be viewed as the result of grouping these local measurements into representations of their common causes. In the auditory system, perceptual grouping is believed to exploit acoustic regularities of natural sounds, such as the tendency of frequencies to be harmonically related or to share a common onset.However, acoustic grouping cues have traditionally been identified using intuitions and informal observation, and investigated using simple, artificial stimuli. As a result,the relevance of known grouping cues to real-world auditory scene analysis remains unclear, and additional or alternative cues remain a possibility. Here we derive auditory grouping cues from co-occurrence statistics of local acoustic features in natural sounds. This process recovers established cues but also reveals previously unappreciated aspects of grouping. The results provide confirmation that auditory grouping is adapted to natural stimulus statistics, and show how these statistics can be harnessed to reveal novel grouping phenomena.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1379762021-11-10T03:44:09Z Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles Mlynarski, Wiktor McDermott, Josh Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Events and objects in the world must be inferred from sensory signals to support behavior. Because sensory signals are transduced with measurements that are temporally and spatially local, the estimation of a particular object or event can be viewed as the result of grouping these local measurements into representations of their common causes. In the auditory system, perceptual grouping is believed to exploit acoustic regularities of natural sounds, such as the tendency of frequencies to be harmonically related or to share a common onset.However, acoustic grouping cues have traditionally been identified using intuitions and informal observation, and investigated using simple, artificial stimuli. As a result,the relevance of known grouping cues to real-world auditory scene analysis remains unclear, and additional or alternative cues remain a possibility. Here we derive auditory grouping cues from co-occurrence statistics of local acoustic features in natural sounds. This process recovers established cues but also reveals previously unappreciated aspects of grouping. The results provide confirmation that auditory grouping is adapted to natural stimulus statistics, and show how these statistics can be harnessed to reveal novel grouping phenomena. 2021-11-09T16:52:50Z 2021-11-09T16:52:50Z 2018 2019-10-03T12:58:54Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137976 Mlynarski, Wiktor and McDermott, Josh. 2018. "Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles." en 10.32470/ccn.2018.1135-0 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Other repository
spellingShingle Mlynarski, Wiktor
McDermott, Josh
Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles
title Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles
title_full Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles
title_fullStr Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles
title_full_unstemmed Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles
title_short Natural Sound Statistics Predict Auditory Grouping Principles
title_sort natural sound statistics predict auditory grouping principles
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137976
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