Cognition Institute, University of Plymouth Plymouth, UK ; School of Psychology, University of Plymouth Plymouth, UK.
Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Budapest, Hungary ; Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics Budapest, Hungary.
Front Neurosci. 2014 Feb 28;8:25. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2014.00025. eCollection 2014.
The ability of the auditory system to parse complex scenes into component objects in order to extract information from the environment is very robust, yet the processing principles underlying this ability are still not well understood. This study was designed to investigate the proposal that the auditory system constructs multiple interpretations of the acoustic scene in parallel, based on the finding that when listening to a long repetitive sequence listeners report switching between different perceptual organizations. Using the "ABA-" auditory streaming paradigm we trained listeners until they could reliably recognize all possible embedded patterns of length four which could in principle be extracted from the sequence, and in a series of test sessions investigated their spontaneous reports of those patterns. With the training allowing them to identify and mark a wider variety of possible patterns, participants spontaneously reported many more patterns than the ones traditionally assumed (Integrated vs. Segregated). Despite receiving consistent training and despite the apparent randomness of perceptual switching, we found individual switching patterns were idiosyncratic; i.e., the perceptual switching patterns of each participant were more similar to their own switching patterns in different sessions than to those of other participants. These individual differences were found to be preserved even between test sessions held a year after the initial experiment. Our results support the idea that the auditory system attempts to extract an exhaustive set of embedded patterns which can be used to generate expectations of future events and which by competing for dominance give rise to (changing) perceptual awareness, with the characteristics of pattern discovery and perceptual competition having a strong idiosyncratic component. Perceptual multistability thus provides a means for characterizing both general mechanisms and individual differences in human perception.
听觉系统将复杂场景分解为组成对象以从中提取环境信息的能力非常强大，但支持这种能力的处理原理仍未得到很好的理解。本研究旨在调查听觉系统是否基于以下发现构建了对声音场景的多种解释：当听众听一个长的重复序列时，他们会报告在不同的感知组织之间切换。我们使用“ABA-”听觉流范式进行训练，直到听众能够可靠地识别出所有可能的长度为四的嵌入模式，这些模式可以从序列中提取出来，然后在一系列测试中调查他们对这些模式的自发报告。通过训练，听众可以识别和标记更多种类的可能模式，他们自发报告的模式比传统上假设的模式（集成与分离）多得多。尽管接受了一致的训练，尽管感知切换似乎是随机的，但我们发现个体切换模式是独特的；也就是说，每个参与者的感知切换模式在不同的测试中与他们自己的模式更相似，而与其他参与者的模式不相似。即使在初始实验一年后进行的测试中，这些个体差异仍然得以保留。我们的结果支持这样一种观点，即听觉系统试图提取一套详尽的嵌入模式，这些模式可用于生成对未来事件的期望，并且通过竞争主导地位，产生（变化的）感知意识，模式发现和感知竞争的特征具有很强的个体差异成分。因此，感知多稳定性为描述人类感知的一般机制和个体差异提供了一种手段。
