Sounds in noise: Behavioral and neural studies of illusory continuity and discontinuity

ability to parse an auditory scene into meaningful components varies greatly between individuals; some are able to parse out and write down competing musical pieces while others struggle to understand each word whenever they have to converse in a noisy environment. Using a simple discrimination task, healthy, normally-heari ng adult participants were asked to judge whether a pure tone (with or without amplitude modulation) was continuous or contained a gap. One quarter of the participants consistently heard a gap when none was present, if the tone was accompanied by a higher-frequency noise burst with a lower edge beginning one octave away from the tone (that did not have any energy overlapping the tone). This novel form of informational masking (perceptual interference between components with non-overlapping sound energy) was named 'illusory auditory discontinuity\u2019. The phenomenon appears to reflect natural differences in auditory processing rather than differences in decision-making strategies because: (1) susceptibility to illusory discontinuity correlates with individual differences in auditory streaming (measured using a classical ABA sequential paradigm); and (2) electroencephalographic responses elicited by tones overlaid by short noise bursts (when these sounds are not the focus of attention) are significantly correlated with the occurrence of illusory auditory discontinuity in both an early event-related potential (ERP) component (40-66 ms), and a later ERP component (270-350 ms) after noise onset. Participants prone to illusory discontinuity also tended not to perceive the \u2018auditory continuity illusion\u2019 (in which a tone is heard continuing under a burst of noise centered on the tone frequency that completely masks it) at short noise durations, but reliably perceived the auditory continuity illusion at longer noise durations. These results suggest that a number of attributes describing how individuals differentially parse complex auditory scenes are related to individual differences in two potentially independent attributes of neural processing, reflected here by EEG waveform differences at ~50 msec and ~300 msec after noise onset. Neural correlates of the auditory continuity illusion were also investigated by adjusting masker loudness, so that when listeners were given physically identical stimuli, they correctly detected the gap in a target tone on some trials, while on other trials they reported the tone as continuous (experiencing illusory continuity). High er power of low-frequency EEG activity (in the delta-theta range, <6 Hz) was observed prior to the onset of tones that were subsequently judged as discontinuous, with no other consistent EEG differences found after the onset of tones. These data suggest that the occurrence of the continuity illusion may depend on the brain state that exists immediately before a trial begins

Neurophysiological Influence of Musical Training on Speech Perception

Does musical training affect our perception of speech? For example, does learning to play a musical instrument modify the neural circuitry for auditory processing in a way that improves one's ability to perceive speech more clearly in noisy environments? If so, can speech perception in individuals with hearing loss (HL), who struggle in noisy situations, benefit from musical training? While music and speech exhibit some specialization in neural processing, there is evidence suggesting that skills acquired through musical training for specific acoustical processes may transfer to, and thereby improve, speech perception. The neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the influence of musical training on speech processing and the extent of this influence remains a rich area to be explored. A prerequisite for such transfer is the facilitation of greater neurophysiological overlap between speech and music processing following musical training. This review first establishes a neurophysiological link between musical training and speech perception, and subsequently provides further hypotheses on the neurophysiological implications of musical training on speech perception in adverse acoustical environments and in individuals with HL

Are There Universal Principles of Brain Computation?

Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-92-J-0225); Office of Naval Research (N00014-91-J-4100, N00014-92-J-1309, N00014-92-J-4015

Individual Differences in Sound-in-Noise Perception Are Related to the Strength of Short-Latency Neural Responses to Noise

Important sounds can be easily missed or misidentified in the presence of extraneous noise. We describe an auditory illusion in which a continuous ongoing tone becomes inaudible during a brief, non-masking noise burst more than one octave away, which is unexpected given the frequency resolution of human hearing. Participants strongly susceptible to this illusory discontinuity did not perceive illusory auditory continuity (in which a sound subjectively continues during a burst of masking noise) when the noises were short, yet did so at longer noise durations. Participants who were not prone to illusory discontinuity showed robust early electroencephalographic responses at 40–66 ms after noise burst onset, whereas those prone to the illusion lacked these early responses. These data suggest that short-latency neural responses to auditory scene components reflect subsequent individual differences in the parsing of auditory scenes

Predictive Top-Down Integration of Prior Knowledge during Speech Perception

A striking feature of human perception is that our subjective experience depends not only on sensory information from the environment but also on our prior knowledge or expectations. The precise mechanisms by which sensory information and prior knowledge are integrated remain unclear, with longstanding disagreement concerning whether integration is strictly feedforward or whether higher-level knowledge influences sensory processing through feedback connections. Here we used concurrent EEG and MEG recordings to determine how sensory information and prior knowledge are integrated in the brain during speech perception. We manipulated listeners' prior knowledge of speech content by presenting matching, mismatching, or neutral written text before a degraded (noise-vocoded) spoken word. When speech conformed to prior knowledge, subjective perceptual clarity was enhanced. This enhancement in clarity was associated with a spatiotemporal profile of brain activity uniquely consistent with a feedback process: activity in the inferior frontal gyrus was modulated by prior knowledge before activity in lower-level sensory regions of the superior temporal gyrus. In parallel, we parametrically varied the level of speech degradation, and therefore the amount of sensory detail, so that changes in neural responses attributable to sensory information and prior knowledge could be directly compared. Although sensory detail and prior knowledge both enhanced speech clarity, they had an opposite influence on the evoked response in the superior temporal gyrus. We argue that these data are best explained within the framework of predictive coding in which sensory activity is compared with top-down predictions and only unexplained activity propagated through the cortical hierarchy

The Developmental Trajectory of Contour Integration in Autism Spectrum Disorders

Sensory input is inherently ambiguous and complex, so perception is believed to be achieved by combining incoming sensory information with prior knowledge. One model envisions the grouping of sensory features (the local dimensions of stimuli) to be the outcome of a predictive process relying on prior experience (the global dimension of stimuli) to disambiguate possible configurations those elements could take. Contour integration, the linking of aligned but separate visual elements, is one example of perceptual grouping. Kanizsa-type illusory contour (IC) stimuli have been widely used to explore contour integration processing. Consisting of two conditions which differ only in the alignment of their inducing elements, one induces the experience of a shape apparently defined by a contour and the second does not. This contour has no counterpart in actual visual space – it is the visual system that fills-in the gap between inducing elements. A well-tested electrophysiological index associated with this process (the IC-effect) provided us with a metric of the visual system’s contribution to contour integration. Using visually evoked potentials (VEP), we began by probing the limits of this metric to three manipulations of contour parameters previously shown to impact subjective experience of illusion strength. Next we detailed the developmental trajectory of contour integration processes over childhood and adolescence. Finally, because persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) have demonstrated an altered balance of global and local processing, we hypothesized that contour integration may be atypical. We compared typical development to development in persons with ASDs to reveal possible mechanisms underlying this processing difference. Our manipulations resulted in no differences in the strength of the IC-effect in adults or children in either group. However, timing of the IC-effect was delayed in two instances: 1) peak latency was delayed by increasing the extent of contour to be filled-in relative to overall IC size and 2) onset latency was delayed in participants with ASDs relative to their neurotypical counterparts

Neural Prediction Errors Distinguish Perception and Misperception of Speech

Humans use prior expectations to improve perception, especially of sensory signals that are degraded or ambiguous. However, if sensory input deviates from prior expectations, correct perception depends on adjusting or rejecting prior expectations. Failure to adjust or reject the prior leads to perceptual illusions especially if there is partial overlap (hence partial mismatch) between expectations and input. With speech, “Slips of the ear” occur when expectations lead to misperception. For instance, a entomologist, might be more susceptible to hear "The ants are my friends" for "The answer, my friend" (in the Bob Dylan song "Blowing in the Wind"). Here, we contrast two mechanisms by which prior expectations may lead to misperception of degraded speech. Firstly, clear representations of the common sounds in the prior and input (i.e., expected sounds) may lead to incorrect confirmation of the prior. Secondly, insufficient representations of sounds that deviate between prior and input (i.e., prediction errors) could lead to deception. We used cross-modal predictions from written words that partially match degraded speech to compare neural responses when male and female human listeners were deceived into accepting the prior or correctly reject it. Combined behavioural and multivariate representational similarity analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data shows that veridical perception of degraded speech is signalled by representations of prediction error in the left superior temporal sulcus. Instead of using top-down processes to support perception of expected sensory input, our findings suggest that the strength of neural prediction error representations distinguishes correct perception and misperception

Quasi-Modal Encounters Of The Third Kind: The Filling-In Of Visual Detail

Although Pessoa et al. imply that many aspects of the filling-in debate may be displaced by a regard for active vision, they remain loyal to naive neural reductionist explanations of certain pieces of psychophysical evidence. Alternative interpretations are provided for two specific examples and a new category of filling-in (of visual detail) is proposed

Acetylcholine neuromodulation in normal and abnormal learning and memory: vigilance control in waking, sleep, autism, amnesia, and Alzheimer's disease

This article provides a unified mechanistic neural explanation of how learning, recognition, and cognition break down during Alzheimer's disease, medial temporal amnesia, and autism. It also clarifies whey there are often sleep disturbances during these disorders. A key mechanism is how acetylcholine modules vigilance control in cortical layer

Stimulus and cognitive factors in cortical entrainment to speech

Understanding speech is a difficult computational problem yet the human brain does it with ease. Entrainment of oscillatory neural activity to acoustic features of speech is an example of dynamic coupling between cortical activity and sensory inputs. The phenomenon may be a bottom-up, sensory-driven neurophysiological mechanism that supports speech processing. However, cognitive top-down factors such as linguistic knowledge and attentional focus affect speech perception, especially in challenging real-world environments. It is unclear how these top-down influences affect cortical entrainment to speech. We used electroencephalography to measure cortical entrainment to speech under conditions of acoustic and cognitive interference. By manipulating the bottom-up, sensory features in the acoustic scene we found evidence of top-down influences of attentional selection and linguistic processing on speech-entrained activity