The ability to detect sudden changes in the environment is critical for survival. Hearing is hypothesized to play a major role in this process by serving as an “early warning device,” rapidly directing attention to new events. Here, we investigate listeners' sensitivity to changes in complex acoustic scenes—what makes certain events “pop-out” and grab attention while others remain unnoticed? We use artificial “scenes” populated by multiple pure-tone components, each with a unique frequency and amplitude modulation rate. Importantly, these scenes lack semantic attributes, which may have confounded previous studies, thus allowing us to probe low-level processes involved in auditory change perception. Our results reveal a striking difference between “appear” and “disappear” events. Listeners are remarkably tuned to object appearance: change detection and identification performance are at ceiling; response times are short, with little effect of scene-size, suggesting a pop-out process. In contrast, listeners have difficulty detecting disappearing objects, even in small scenes: performance rapidly deteriorates with growing scene-size; response times are slow, and even when change is detected, the changed component is rarely successfully identified. We also measured change detection performance when a noise or silent gap was inserted at the time of change or when the scene was interrupted by a distractor that occurred at the time of change but did not mask any scene elements. Gaps adversely affected the processing of item appearance but not disappearance. However, distractors reduced both appearance and disappearance detection. Together, our results suggest a role for neural adaptation and sensitivity to transients in the process of auditory change detection, similar to what has been demonstrated for visual change detection. Importantly, listeners consistently performed better for item addition (relative to deletion) across all scene interruptions used, suggesting a robust perceptual representation of item appearance.
References
[1]
Rensink RA (2000) Seeing, sensing, and scrutinizing. Vision Res 40: 1469–87.
[2]
Simons DJ, Rensink RA (2005) Change blindness: past, present, and future. Trends Cogn Sci 9: 16–20.
Mazza V, Turatto M, Rossi M, Umiltà C (2007) How automatic are audiovisual links in exogenous spatial attention? Neuropsychologia 45: 514–22.
[9]
Gregg MK, Samuel AG (2008) Change deafness and the organizational properties of sounds. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 34: 974–91.
[10]
Pavani F, Turatto M (2008) Change perception in complex auditory scenes. Percept Psychophys 70: 619–29.
[11]
Eramudugolla R, Irvine DR, McAnally KI, Martin RL, Mattingley JB (2005) Directed attention eliminates ‘change deafness’ in complex auditory scenes. Curr Biol 15: 1108–13.
[12]
Gregg MK, Snyder JS (2012) Enhanced sensory processing accompanies successful detection of change for real-world sounds. Neuroimage 62: 113–9.
[13]
Demany L, Trost W, Serman M, Semal C (2008) Auditory change detection: simple sounds are not memorized better than complex sounds. Psychol Sci 19: 85–91.
[14]
Moore BCJ, Glasberg BR (1983) Suggested formulae for calculating auditory-filter bandwidths and excitation patterns. J Acoust Soc Am 74: 750–753.
[15]
Macmillan NA, Creelman CD (2005) Detection theory: A user's guide (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
[16]
Moore BC, Peters RW, Glasberg BR (1999) Effects of frequency and duration on psychometric functions for detection of increments and decrements in sinusoids in noise. J Acoust Soc Am 106: 3539–3552.
[17]
Moore BC, Peters RW, Kohlrausch A, van de Par S (1997) Detection of increments and decrements in sinusoids as a function of frequency, increment, and decrement duration and pedestal duration. J Acoust Soc Am 102: 2954–65.
[18]
Scholl B, Gao X, Wehr M (2010) Nonoverlapping sets of synapses drive on responses and off responses in auditory cortex. Neuron 65: 412–21.
[19]
Fishman YI, Steinschneider M (2009) Temporally dynamic frequency tuning of population responses in monkey primary auditory cortex. Hear Res 254: 64–76.
[20]
Qin L, Chimoto S, Sakai M, Wang J, Sato Y (2007) Comparison between offset and onset responses of primary auditory cortex ON-OFF neurons in awake cats. J Neurophysiol 97: 3421–31.
[21]
Moshitch D, Las L, Ulanovsky N, Bar-Yosef O, Nelken I (2006) Responses of neurons in primary auditory cortex (A1) to pure tones in the halothane-anesthetized cat. J Neurophysiol 95: 3756–69.
[22]
Phillips DP, Hall SE, Boehnke SE (2002) Central auditory onset responses, and temporal asymmetries in auditory perception. Hear Res 167: 192–205.
[23]
Chait M, Poeppel D, Simon JZ (2008) Auditory temporal edge detection in human auditory cortex. Brain Res 1213: 78–90.
[24]
Yamashiro K, Inui K, Otsuru N, Kida T, Kakigi R (2009) automatic auditory off-response in humans: an MEG study. Eur J Neurosci 30: 125–31.
[25]
Fujioka T, Trainor LJ, Large EW, Ross B (2009) Beta and gamma rhythms in human auditory cortex during musical beat processing. Ann N Y Acad Sci 1169: 89–92.
[26]
Wang X (2007) Neural coding strategies in auditory cortex. Hear Res 229: 81–93.
[27]
McAnally KI, Martin RL, Eramudugolla R, Stuart GW, Irvine DR, et al. (2010) A dual-process account of auditory change detection. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 36: 994–1004.
[28]
Summerfield Q, Sidwell A, Nelson T (1987) Auditory enhancement of changes in spectral amplitude. J Acoust Soc Am 81: 700–8.
[29]
Hartmann WM, Goupell MJ (2006) Enhancing and unmasking the harmonics of a complex tone. J Acoust Soc Am 120: 2142–57.
[30]
Erviti M, Semal C, Demany L (2011) Enhancing a tone by shifting its frequency or intensity. J Acoust Soc Am 129: 3837–45.
[31]
Bregman AS, Ahad PA, Kim J (1994) Resetting the pitch-analysis system. 2. Role of sudden onsets and offsets in the perception of individual components in a cluster of overlapping tones. J Acoust Soc Am 96: 2694–703.
[32]
Kubovy M (1981) Concurrent pitch segregation and the theory of indispensable attributes. In Kubovy M, Pomerantz JR, editors. Perceptual Organization. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
[33]
Wolfe JM (2001) Asymmetries in visual search: an introduction. Percept Psychophys 63: 381–9.
[34]
Creutzfeldt O, Hellweg FC, Schreiner C (1980) Thalamocortical transformation of responses to complex auditory stimuli. Exp Brain Res 39: 87–104.
[35]
Phillips DP, Hall SE, Hollett JL (1989) Repetition rate and signal level effects on neuronal responses to brief tone pulses in cat auditory cortex. J Acoust Soc Am 85: 2537–49.
[36]
Ulanovsky N, Las L, Farkas D, Nelken I (2004) Multiple time scales of adaptation in auditory cortex neurons. J Neurosci 24: 10440–53.
[37]
Cole GG, Kuhn G (2010) Attentional capture by object appearance and disappearance. Q J Exp Psychol (Colchester) 63: 147–59.
