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Oculomotor inhibition precedes temporally expected auditory targets.

ABSTRACT: Eye movements are inhibited prior to the onset of temporally-predictable visual targets. This oculomotor inhibition effect could be considered a marker for the formation of temporal expectations and the allocation of temporal attention in the visual domain. Here we show that eye movements are also inhibited before predictable auditory targets. In two experiments, we manipulate the period between a cue and an auditory target to be either predictable or unpredictable. The findings show that although there is no perceptual gain from avoiding gaze-shifts in this procedure, saccades and blinks are inhibited prior to predictable relative to unpredictable auditory targets. These findings show that oculomotor inhibition occurs prior to auditory targets. This link between auditory expectation and oculomotor behavior reveals a multimodal perception action coupling, which has a central role in temporal expectations.

SUBMITTER: Abeles D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7360783 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Oculomotor inhibition precedes temporally expected auditory targets.

Abeles Dekel D Amit Roy R Tal-Perry Noam N Carrasco Marisa M Yuval-Greenberg Shlomit S

Nature communications 20200714 1

Eye movements are inhibited prior to the onset of temporally-predictable visual targets. This oculomotor inhibition effect could be considered a marker for the formation of temporal expectations and the allocation of temporal attention in the visual domain. Here we show that eye movements are also inhibited before predictable auditory targets. In two experiments, we manipulate the period between a cue and an auditory target to be either predictable or unpredictable. The findings show that althou ...[more]

PMID: 32665559

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Project description:BackgroundBehavioral studies have shown that infants can form associations between environmental events and produce anticipatory actions for the predictable event, but the neural mechanisms for the learning and anticipation of events in infants are not known. Recent neuroimaging studies revealed that the association cortices of infants show activation related to auditory-stimulus discrimination and novelty detection during sleep. In the present study, we expected that when an auditory cue (beeps) predicted an auditory event (a female voice), specific regions of the infant cortex would show anticipatory activation before the event onset even while sleeping.Methodology/principal findingsWe examined the cortical activation of 3-month-old infants during delays between the cue and the event by using multi-channel near-infrared spectroscopy. To investigate spatiotemporal changes in cortical activation over the experimental session, we divided the session into two phases (early and late phase) and analyzed each phase separately. In the early phase, the frontal regions showed activation in response to the cue that was followed by the event compared with another cue that was not followed by any event. In the late phase, the temporoparietal region, in addition to the frontal region, showed prominent activation in response to the cue followed by the event. In contrast, when the cue was followed by an event and no-event in equal proportions, cortical activation in response to the cue was not observed in any phase.ConclusionsSleeping 3-month-old infants showed anticipatory cortical activation in the temporoparietal and frontal regions only in response to the cue predicting the event, suggesting that infants can implicitly form associations between temporally separated events and generate the anticipatory activation before the predictable event. Furthermore, the different time evolution of activation in the temporoparietal and frontal regions suggests that these regions may be involved in different aspects of learning and predicting future events.

Project description:Many audio applications perform perception-based time-frequency (TF) analysis by decomposing sounds into a set of functions with good TF localization (i.e. with a small essential support in the TF domain) using TF transforms and applying psychoacoustic models of auditory masking to the transform coefficients. To accurately predict masking interactions between coefficients, the TF properties of the model should match those of the transform. This involves having masking data for stimuli with good TF localization. However, little is known about TF masking for mathematically well-localized signals. Most existing masking studies used stimuli that are broad in time and/or frequency and few studies involved TF conditions. Consequently, the present study had two goals. The first was to collect TF masking data for well-localized stimuli in humans. Masker and target were 10-ms Gaussian-shaped sinusoids with a bandwidth of approximately one critical band. The overall pattern of results is qualitatively similar to existing data for long maskers. To facilitate implementation in audio processing algorithms, a dataset provides the measured TF masking function. The second goal was to assess the potential effect of auditory efferents on TF masking using a modeling approach. The temporal window model of masking was used to predict present and existing data in two configurations: (1) with standard model parameters (i.e. without efferents), (2) with cochlear gain reduction to simulate the activation of efferents. The ability of the model to predict the present data was quite good with the standard configuration but highly degraded with gain reduction. Conversely, the ability of the model to predict existing data for long maskers was better with than without gain reduction. Overall, the model predictions suggest that TF masking can be affected by efferent (or other) effects that reduce cochlear gain. Such effects were avoided in the experiment of this study by using maximally-compact stimuli.

Dataset Information

Oculomotor inhibition precedes temporally expected auditory targets.

Publications

Oculomotor inhibition precedes temporally expected auditory targets.

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