Perceptual benefits from long-term exposure to naturalistic sound patterns
Abstract
Our brains are proficient in learning recurring structures in the environment, in order to optimize perceptual inferences based on relevant information in a stochastic input. Sensory information is multi-dimensional, and the relationship between sound dimensions may be, in itself, a source of information. Many sounds in our environment covary dynamically, and these covariances may be learned, and therefore shape our perception, through exposure to them in our natural environment. In the present study we investigate how natural (long term), and experimental (short term), learning of statistical regularities in sounds may shape our ability to categorize them (Experiment 1) and to perceptually segregate them more easily from target speech (Experiment 2). Our results indicate that sounds that obey naturalistic pitch-speed relationships are more easily categorized than those that violate these expectations. However, these benefits did not translate into greater segregability of these naturalistic patterns from speech, although my method may have not been sufficiently sensitive to such effects. These findings highlight the ways in which long-term life experience may influence our auditory perception.