Temporal-Coherence Induces Binding of Responses to Sound Sequences in Ferret Auditory Cortex.

Binding the attributes of a sensory source is necessary to perceive it as a unified entity, one that can be attended to and extracted from its surrounding scene. In auditory perception, this is the essence of the cocktail party problem in which a listener segregates one speaker from a mixture of voices, or a musical stream from simultaneous others. It is postulated that coherence of the temporal modulations of a source's features is necessary to bind them.

Performance on stochastic figure-ground perception varies with individual differences in speech-in-noise recognition and working memory capacity.

Speech recognition in noisy environments can be challenging and requires listeners to accurately segregate a target speaker from irrelevant background noise. Stochastic figure-ground (SFG) tasks in which temporally coherent inharmonic pure-tones must be identified from a background have been used to probe the non-linguistic auditory stream segregation processes important for speech-in-noise processing. However, little is known about the relationship between performance on SFG tasks and speech-in-noise tasks nor the individual differences that may modulate such relationships.

Adaptive Efficient Coding of Correlated Acoustic Properties.

Natural sounds such as vocalizations often have covarying acoustic attributes, resulting in redundancy in neural coding. The efficient coding hypothesis proposes that sensory systems are able to detect such covariation and adapt to reduce redundancy, leading to more efficient neural coding. Recent psychoacoustic studies have shown the auditory system can rapidly adapt to efficiently encode two covarying dimensions as a single dimension, following passive exposure to sounds in which temporal and spectral attributes covaried in a correlated fashion.

Spectro-temporal templates unify the pitch percepts of resolved and unresolved harmonics.

Pitch is a fundamental attribute in auditory perception involved in source identification and segregation, music, and speech understanding. Pitch percepts are intimately related to harmonic resolvability of sound. When harmonics are well-resolved, the induced pitch is usually salient and precise, and several models relying on autocorrelations or harmonic spectral templates can account for these percepts.

Differences in the strength of cortical and brainstem inputs to SSA and non-SSA neurons in the inferior colliculus.

In an ever changing auditory scene, change detection is an ongoing task performed by the auditory brain. Neurons in the midbrain and auditory cortex that exhibit stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) may contribute to this process. Those neurons adapt to frequent sounds while retaining their excitability to rare sounds.