Sound category habituation requires task-relevant attention

Frontiers in Neuroscience

Neuroscience

Howard S. Moskowitz¹  Elyse S. Sussman² 

[1] Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, United States;Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, United States;Department of Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, Unites States;

关键词: categorical perception;    attention;    speech;    implicit learning;    event-related brain potentials (ERPs);   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnins.2023.1228506

 received in 2023-05-24, accepted in 2023-10-12,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

IntroductionProcessing the wealth of sensory information from the surrounding environment is a vital human function with the potential to develop learning, advance social interactions, and promote safety and well-being.MethodsTo elucidate underlying processes governing these activities we measured neurophysiological responses to patterned stimulus sequences during a sound categorization task to evaluate attention effects on implicit learning, sound categorization, and speech perception. Using a unique experimental design, we uncoupled conceptual categorical effects from stimulus-specific effects by presenting categorical stimulus tokens that did not physically repeat.ResultsWe found effects of implicit learning, categorical habituation, and a speech perception bias when the sounds were attended, and the listeners performed a categorization task (task-relevant). In contrast, there was no evidence of a speech perception bias, implicit learning of the structured sound sequence, or repetition suppression to repeated within-category sounds (no categorical habituation) when participants passively listened to the sounds and watched a silent closed-captioned video (task-irrelevant). No indication of category perception was demonstrated in the scalp-recorded brain components when participants were watching a movie and had no task with the sounds.DiscussionThese results demonstrate that attention is required to maintain category identification and expectations induced by a structured sequence when the conceptual information must be extracted from stimuli that are acoustically distinct. Taken together, these striking attention effects support the theoretical view that top-down control is required to initiate expectations for higher level cognitive processing.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Moskowitz and Sussman.