detection of appearing and disappearing objects in complex acoustic scenes检测中出现和消失的物体复杂声场景.pdfVIP

Detection of Appearing and Disappearing Objects in Complex Acoustic Scenes 1.¤a 1.¤b 1 2 Francisco Cervantes Constantino , Leyla Pinggera , Supathum Paranamana , Makio Kashino , Maria Chait1* 1 Ear Institute, University College London, London, United Kingdom, 2 NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Atsugi, Japan Abstract The ability to detect sudden changes in the environment is critical for survival. Hearing is hypothesized to play a major role in this process by serving as an ‘‘early warning device,’’ rapidly directing attention to new events. Here, we investigate listeners’ sensitivity to changes in complex acoustic scenes—what makes certain events ‘‘pop-out’’ and grab attention while others remain unnoticed? We use artificial ‘‘scenes’’ populated by multiple pure-tone components, each with a unique frequency and amplitude modulation rate. Importantly, these scenes lack semantic attributes, which may have confounded previous studies, thus allowing us to probe low-level processes involved in auditory change perception. Our results reveal a striking difference between ‘‘appear’’ and ‘‘disappear’’ events. Listeners are remarkably tuned to object appearance: change detection and identification performance are at ceiling; response times are short, with little effect of scene-size, suggesting a pop-out process. In contrast, listeners have difficulty detecting disappearing objects, even in small scenes: performance rapidly deteriorates with growing scene-size; response times are slow, and even when change is detected, the changed component is rarely successfully identified. We also measured change detection performance when a noise or silent