Faculty Collaboration Database

First-order and second-order spectral 'motion' mechanisms in the human auditory system. Perception 2003;32(9):1141-9

Date

12/04/2003

Pubmed ID

14651326

DOI

10.1068/p5077

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-0346318553 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   3 Citations

Abstract

Light energy displaced along the retinal photoreceptor array leads to a perception of visual motion. In audition, displacement of mechanical energy along the cochlear hair cell array is conceptually similar but leads to a perception of 'movement' in frequency space (spectral motion)--a rising or falling pitch. In vision there are other types of stimuli that also evoke a percept of motion but do not involve a displacement of energy across the photoreceptors (second-order stimuli). In this study, we used psychophysical methods to determine if such second-order stimuli also exist in audition, and if the resulting percept would rival that of first-order spectral motion. First-order auditory stimuli consisted of a frequency sweep of sixteen non-harmonic tones between 297 and 12123 Hz. Second-order stimuli consisted of the same tones, but with a random subset turned on at the beginning of a trial. During the trial, each tone in sequence randomly changed state (ON-to-OFF, or OFF-to-ON). Thus, state transitions created a 'sweep' having no net energy displacement correlated to the sweep direction. At relatively slow sweep speeds, subjects readily identified the sweep direction for both first-order and second-order stimuli, though accuracy decreased for second-order stimuli as the sweep speed increased. This latter characteristic is also true of some second-order visual stimuli. These results suggest a stronger parallelism between auditory and visual processing than previously appreciated.

Author List

Huddleston WE, DeYoe EA

Author

Edgar A. DeYoe PhD Adjunct Professor in the Radiology department at Medical College of Wisconsin

MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Acoustic Stimulation
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Auditory Perception
Female
Humans
Male
Motion
Motion Perception
Psychophysics