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Unsupervised repetition enables rapid perceptual learning
Vahid Montazeri1, Michelle R Kapolowicz2, Peter F Assmann1
1School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080, USA.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|December 2, 2021
Summary
Repetition helps listeners identify target sounds within complex auditory scenes. Repeated sounds become perceptually salient, enabling recognition of their features, unlike non-repeated sounds.
Area of Science:
- Auditory Perception
- Psychoacoustics
- Computational Auditory Scene Analysis
Background:
- Listeners often face challenges in distinguishing individual sound sources from complex auditory environments.
- Understanding auditory scene analysis is crucial for fields like hearing aid development and artificial intelligence.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how auditory repetition aids in segregating and identifying target sounds amidst competing novel sounds.
- To explore the role of perceptual salience in recognizing sound features based on repetition.
- To compare human listener performance with computational models of auditory learning.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Replicated previous findings using multivariate Gaussian models to create sound mixtures and assessed identification after exposure.
- Experiment 2: Extended the task to recognition of temporal ramps in repeating versus non-repeating sounds.
- Computational Modeling: Compared human results with generalized Hebbian and anti-Hebbian learning network models.
Main Results:
- Listeners struggled to identify novel sounds in mixtures without specific repetition strategies.
- Repetition significantly enhanced the perceptual salience of a target sound, facilitating recognition of its temporal ramp.
- A generalized Hebbian learning model mirrored human listener performance, while an anti-Hebbian model showed opposite patterns.
Conclusions:
- Auditory repetition is a key mechanism for source segregation and enhancing perceptual salience in complex sound environments.
- Hebbian learning principles may underlie the human ability to extract and recognize repeated auditory sources.
- These findings have implications for understanding auditory attention and developing more effective auditory processing models.
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