Dataset Information

Context-Dependent Effect of Reverberation on Material Perception from Impact Sound.

ABSTRACT: Our hearing is usually robust against reverberation. This study asked how such robustness to daily sound is realized, and what kinds of acoustic cues contribute to the robustness. We focused on the perception of materials based on impact sounds, which is a common daily experience, and for which the responsible acoustic features have already been identified in the absence of reverberation. In our experiment, we instructed the participants to identify materials from impact sounds with and without reverberation. The imposition of reverberation did not alter the average responses across participants to perceived materials. However, an analysis of each participant revealed the significant effect of reverberation with response patterns varying among participants. The effect depended on the context of the stimulus presentation, namely it was smaller for a constant reverberation than when the reverberation varied presentation by presentation. The context modified the relative contribution of the spectral features of the sounds to material identification, while no consistent change across participants was observed as regards the temporal features. Although the detailed results varied greatly among the participants, these results suggest that a mechanism exists in the auditory system that compensates for reverberation based on adaptation to the spectral features of reverberant sound.

SUBMITTER: Koumura T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5705663 | biostudies-other | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Context-Dependent Effect of Reverberation on Material Perception from Impact Sound.

Koumura Takuya T Furukawa Shigeto S

Scientific reports 20171128 1

Our hearing is usually robust against reverberation. This study asked how such robustness to daily sound is realized, and what kinds of acoustic cues contribute to the robustness. We focused on the perception of materials based on impact sounds, which is a common daily experience, and for which the responsible acoustic features have already been identified in the absence of reverberation. In our experiment, we instructed the participants to identify materials from impact sounds with and without ...[more]

PMID: 29184117

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Project description:The ability to process and act upon incoming sounds during locomotion is critical for survival and adaptive behavior. Despite the established role that the auditory cortex (AC) plays in behavior- and context-dependent sound processing, previous studies have found that auditory cortical activity is on average suppressed during locomotion as compared to immobility. While suppression of auditory cortical responses to self-generated sounds results from corollary discharge, which weakens responses to predictable sounds, the functional role of weaker responses to unpredictable external sounds during locomotion remains unclear. In particular, whether suppression of external sound-evoked responses during locomotion reflects reduced involvement of the AC in sound processing or whether it results from masking by an alternative neural computation in this state remains unresolved. Here, we tested the hypothesis that rather than simple inhibition, reduced sound-evoked responses during locomotion reflect a tradeoff with the emergence of explicit and reliable coding of locomotion velocity. To test this hypothesis, we first used neural inactivation in behaving mice and found that the AC plays a critical role in sound-guided behavior during locomotion. To investigate the nature of this processing, we used two-photon calcium imaging of local excitatory auditory cortical neural populations in awake mice. We found that locomotion had diverse influences on activity of different neurons, with a net suppression of baseline-subtracted sound-evoked responses and neural stimulus detection, consistent with previous studies. Importantly, we found that the net inhibitory effect of locomotion on baseline-subtracted sound-evoked responses was strongly shaped by elevated ongoing activity that compressed the response dynamic range, and that rather than reflecting enhanced "noise," this ongoing activity reliably encoded the animal's locomotion speed. Decoding analyses revealed that locomotion speed and sound are robustly co-encoded by auditory cortical ensemble activity. Finally, we found consistent patterns of joint coding of sound and locomotion speed in electrophysiologically recorded activity in freely moving rats. Together, our data suggest that rather than being suppressed by locomotion, auditory cortical ensembles explicitly encode it alongside sound information to support sound perception during locomotion.

Dataset Information

Context-Dependent Effect of Reverberation on Material Perception from Impact Sound.

Publications

Context-Dependent Effect of Reverberation on Material Perception from Impact Sound.

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