Name
Title | ||
|---|---|---|
Human pitch detectors are tuned on a fine scale, but are perceptually accessed on a coarse scale |
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Single neurons in auditory cortex display highly selective spectrotemporal properties: their receptive fields modulate over small fractions of an octave and integrate across temporal windows of 100---200 ms. We investigated how these characteristics impact auditory behavior. Human observers were asked to detect a specific sound frequency masked by broadband noise; we adopted an experimental design which required the engagement of frequency-selective mechanisms to perform above chance. We then applied psychophysical reverse correlation to derive spectrotemporal perceptual filters for the assigned task. We were able to expose signatures of neuronal-like spectrotemporal tuning on a scale of 1/10 octave and 50---100 ms, but detailed modeling of our results showed that observers were not able to rely on the explicit output of these channels. Instead, human observers pooled from a large bank of highly selective channels via a weighting envelope poorly tuned for frequency (on a scale of 1.5 octave) with sluggish temporal dynamics, followed by a highly nonlinear max-like operation. We conclude that human detection of specific frequencies embedded within complex sounds suffers from a high degree of intrinsic spectrotemporal uncertainty, resulting in low efficiency values (< 1 %) for this perceptual ability. Signatures of the underlying neural circuitry can be exposed, but there does not appear to be a direct line for accessing individual neural channels on a fine scale. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2012 | 10.1007/s00422-012-0510-x | Biological Cybernetics |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
Noise image classification,Computational modeling,Psychophysics,MAX uncertainty model | Receptive field,Auditory cortex,Audio frequency,Octave,Computer science,Speech recognition,Biological neural network,A-weighting,Psychophysics,Detector | Journal |
Volume | Issue | ISSN |
106 | 8-9 | 0340-1200 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
3 | 0.45 | 2 |
Authors | ||
2 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eva R. Joosten | 1 | 3 | 0.79 |
| Peter Neri | 2 | 4 | 2.17 |