Assessing the background decomposition of a complex auditory scene with event-related brain potentials

ABSTRACT A listener who focusses on a sound source of interest must continuously integrate the sounds emitted by the attended source and ignore the sounds emitted by the remaining sources in the auditory scene. Little is known about how the ignored sound sources in the background are mentally represented after the source of interest has formed the perceptual foreground. This is due to a key methodological challenge: the background representation is by definition not overtly reportable. Here we developed a paradigm based on event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) to assess the mental representation of background sounds. Participants listened to sequences of three repeatedly presented tones arranged in an ascending order (low, middle, high frequency). They were instructed to detect intensity deviants in one of the tones, creating the perceptual foreground. The remaining two background tones contained timing and location deviants. Those deviants were set up such that mismatch negativity (MMN) components would be elicited in distinct ways if the background was decomposed into two separate sound streams (background segregation) or if it was not further decomposed (background integration). Results provide MMN‐based evidence for background segregation and integration in parallel. This suggests that mental representations of background integration and segregation can be concurrently available, and that collecting empirical evidence for only one of these background organization alternatives might lead to erroneous conclusions. HighlightsWe study mental representation of background tones in an auditory scene via ERPs.Segregated and integrated background representations can be available in parallel.One exclusive representation is held when stimulus parameters strongly enforce it.

[1]  L. Deouell,et al.  Variable cerebral responses to equally distinct deviance in four auditory dimensions: a mismatch negativity study. , 1998, Psychophysiology.

[2]  I. Winkler,et al.  Organizing sound sequences in the human brain: the interplay of auditory streaming and temporal integration 1 1 Published on the World Wide Web on 27 February 2001. , 2001, Brain Research.

[3]  W. Ritter,et al.  The sources of auditory evoked responses recorded from the human scalp. , 1970, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[4]  Arnaud Delorme,et al.  EEGLAB: an open source toolbox for analysis of single-trial EEG dynamics including independent component analysis , 2004, Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

[5]  I. Winkler,et al.  Preattentive auditory context effects , 2003, Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience.

[6]  Neil A. Macmillan,et al.  Detection Theory: A User's Guide , 1991 .

[7]  S H Hulse.  The auditory scene. , 1991, Science.

[8]  A. Bregman,et al.  Attentional modulation of electrophysiological activity in auditory cortex for unattended sounds within multistream auditory environments , 2005, Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience.

[9]  R. Ilmoniemi,et al.  Temporal window of integration of auditory information in the human brain. , 1998, Psychophysiology.

[10]  Stephen McAdams,et al.  Perceptual organization of complex auditory sequences: effect of number of simultaneous subsequences and frequency separation. , 1999, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[11]  I. Winkler,et al.  The role of attention in the formation of auditory streams , 2007, Perception & psychophysics.

[12]  A. Bregman,et al.  Effects of task-switching on neural representations of ambiguous sound input , 2014, Neuropsychologia.

[13]  S. Andersen,et al.  Measuring target detection performance in paradigms with high event rates , 2013, Clinical Neurophysiology.

[14]  J. Meere.  The role of attention. , 2002 .

[15]  I. Winkler,et al.  Human auditory cortex tracks task-irrelevant sound sources , 2003, Neuroreport.

[16]  M. Steinschneider,et al.  Neurophysiological evidence for context-dependent encoding of sensory input in human auditory cortex , 2006, Brain Research.

[17]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  The mismatch negativity: A review of underlying mechanisms , 2009, Clinical Neurophysiology.

[18]  M. Tervaniemi,et al.  New fast mismatch negativity paradigm for determining the neural prerequisites for musical ability , 2011, Cortex.

[19]  T. Rahne,et al.  Visual cues release the temporal coherence of auditory objects in auditory scene analysis , 2009, Brain Research.

[20]  B C Moore,et al.  The role of spectral and periodicity cues in auditory stream segregation, measured using a temporal discrimination task. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[21]  D Deacon,et al.  Automatic change detection: does the auditory system use representations of individual stimulus features or gestalts? , 1998, Psychophysiology.

[22]  Terrence J. Sejnowski,et al.  An Information-Maximization Approach to Blind Separation and Blind Deconvolution , 1995, Neural Computation.

[23]  R. Näätänen.  The role of attention in auditory information processing as revealed by event-related potentials and other brain measures of cognitive function , 1990, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[24]  J Horváth,et al.  Simultaneously active pre-attentive representations of local and global rules for sound sequences in the human brain. , 2001, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[25]  Brian C J Moore,et al.  Properties of auditory stream formation , 2012, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[26]  W. Teder-Sälejärvi,et al.  Preattentive evaluation of multiple perceptual streams in human audition , 2003, Neuroreport.

[27]  I. Winkler,et al.  Perceptual bistability in auditory streaming: How much do stimulus features matter? , 2013 .

[28]  A. Oxenham,et al.  Objective and Subjective Psychophysical Measures of Auditory Stream Integration and Segregation , 2010, Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.

[29]  Sonja A. Kotz,et al.  Using a staircase procedure for the objective measurement of auditory stream integration and segregation thresholds , 2013, Front. Psychol..

[30]  Daniel Pressnitzer,et al.  The initial phase of auditory and visual scene analysis , 2012, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[31]  M. Tervaniemi,et al.  The mismatch negativity in cognitive and clinical neuroscience: Theoretical and methodological considerations , 2007, Biological Psychology.

[32]  C. Herrmann,et al.  Analyzing the Auditory Scene: Neurophysiologic Evidence of a Dissociation Between Detection of Regularity and Detection of Change , 2015, Brain Topography.

[33]  I. Winkler,et al.  Auditory stream segregation processes operate similarly in school-aged children and adults , 2001, Hearing Research.

[34]  Susan Denham,et al.  Multistability in auditory stream segregation: a predictive coding view , 2012, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[35]  A. Bregman,et al.  Primary auditory stream segregation and perception of order in rapid sequences of tones. , 1971, Journal of experimental psychology.

[36]  A. Oxenham,et al.  Pitch, harmonicity and concurrent sound segregation: Psychoacoustical and neurophysiological findings , 2010, Hearing Research.

[37]  H. Yabe,et al.  Temporal window of integration revealed by MMN to sound omission , 1997, Neuroreport.

[38]  L. V. Noorden.  Temporal coherence in the perception of tone sequences , 1975 .

[39]  B. Moore,et al.  Primitive stream segregation of tone sequences without differences in fundamental frequency or passband. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[40]  Alexandra Bendixen,et al.  Subjective perceptual organization of a complex auditory scene. , 2017, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[41]  R Hari,et al.  Deviant auditory stimuli activate human left and right auditory cortex differently. , 1996, Cerebral cortex.

[42]  Friedemann Pulvermüller,et al.  Objective Measures of Auditory Scene Analysis , 2010 .

[43]  E. Schröger,et al.  Attention effects on auditory scene analysis: insights from event-related brain potentials , 2014, Psychological research.

[44]  R. Carlyon,et al.  Effects of location, frequency region, and time course of selective attention on auditory scene analysis. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[45]  Guideline Thirteen: Guidelines for Standard Electrode Position Nomenclature , 1994, Journal of clinical neurophysiology : official publication of the American Electroencephalographic Society.

[46]  Till R. Schneider,et al.  Using ICA for the Analysis of Multi-Channel EEG Data , 2010 .

[47]  E. Sussman,et al.  Neural representations of auditory input accommodate to the context in a dynamically changing acoustic environment , 2009, The European journal of neuroscience.

[48]  E. Sussman,et al.  The Five Myths of MMN: Redefining How to Use MMN in Basic and Clinical Research , 2014, Brain Topography.