Auditory Grouping Cues

Authors: Wiktor MłynarskiJosh H. McDermott
Updated: Tue 10 December 2019
Source: http://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/grouping_statistics/index.html
Type: audio files
Languages: N/A
Keywords: sensoryauditionfrequencyharmony
Open Access: yes
License:
Publications: Młynarski, W. & McDermott, J. (2019). Ecological origins of perceptual grouping principles in the auditory system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 116(50): 25355-25364. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1903887116
Citation: Młynarski, W. & McDermott, J. (2019). Ecological origins of perceptual grouping principles in the auditory system - stimulus examples. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. http://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/grouping_statistics/index.html
Summary:

Here, we develop a general methodology for relating grouping to natural sensory signals and apply it to derive auditory grouping cues from natural sounds. We first learned local spectrotemporal features from natural sounds and measured their co-occurrence statistics. We then learned a small set of stimulus properties that could predict the measured feature co-occurrences. The resulting cues included established grouping cues, such as harmonic frequency relationships and temporal coincidence, but also revealed previously unappreciated grouping principles. Human perceptual grouping was predicted by natural feature co-occurrence, with humans relying on the derived grouping cues in proportion to their informativity about co-occurrence in natural sounds. The results suggest that auditory grouping is adapted to natural stimulus statistics, show how these statistics can reveal previously unappreciated grouping phenomena, and provide a framework for studying grouping in natural signals.