Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, United Kingdom, University College London Ear Institute, London WC1X 8EE, United Kingdom, and Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QX, United Kingdom.
J Neurosci. 2014 Jan 29;34(5):1963-9. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4274-13.2013.
Adaptation to both common and rare sounds has been independently reported in neurophysiological studies using probabilistic stimulus paradigms in small mammals. However, the apparent sensitivity of the mammalian auditory system to the statistics of incoming sound has not yet been generalized to task-related human auditory perception. Here, we show that human listeners selectively adapt to novel sounds within scenes unfolding over minutes. Listeners' performance in an auditory discrimination task remains steady for the most common elements within the scene but, after the first minute, performance improves for distinct and rare (oddball) sound elements, at the expense of rare sounds that are relatively less distinct. Our data provide the first evidence of enhanced coding of oddball sounds in a human auditory discrimination task and suggest the existence of an adaptive mechanism that tracks the long-term statistics of sounds and deploys coding resources accordingly.
在使用概率刺激范式的神经生理学研究中，已经独立报道了小型哺乳动物对常见和罕见声音的适应。然而，哺乳动物听觉系统对传入声音统计数据的明显敏感性尚未推广到与任务相关的人类听觉感知。在这里，我们表明，人类听众会选择性地适应在数分钟内展开的场景中的新声音。在听觉辨别任务中，听众对场景中最常见元素的表现保持稳定，但在第一分钟后，对于独特和罕见（异类）的声音元素，表现会提高，而对于相对不太独特的罕见声音则会降低。我们的数据提供了人类听觉辨别任务中异类声音编码增强的第一个证据，并表明存在一种自适应机制，该机制可以跟踪声音的长期统计数据并相应地部署编码资源。
