Illusory sound texture reveals multi-second statistical completion in auditory scene analysis
Name
s41467-019-12893-0.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.82 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3f9e22a49164992c86f4788ea24f949d
Author(s)
McWalter, Richard
McDermott, Josh H
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019, The Author(s). Sound sources in the world are experienced as stable even when intermittently obscured, implying perceptual completion mechanisms that “fill in” missing sensory information. We demonstrate a filling-in phenomenon in which the brain extrapolates the statistics of background sounds (textures) over periods of several seconds when they are interrupted by another sound, producing vivid percepts of illusory texture. The effect differs from previously described completion effects in that 1) the extrapolated sound must be defined statistically given the stochastic nature of texture, and 2) the effect lasts much longer, enabling introspection and facilitating assessment of the underlying representation. Illusory texture biases subsequent texture statistic estimates indistinguishably from actual texture, suggesting that it is represented similarly to actual texture. The illusion appears to represent an inference about whether the background is likely to continue during concurrent sounds, providing a stable statistical representation of the ongoing environment despite unstable sensory evidence.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-019-12893-0
