Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, United States of America; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, United States of America.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, United States of America; HHMI Postdoctoral Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation, United States of America; Laboratoire des Sytèmes Perceptifs, Département d'études cognitives, ENS, PSL Research University, CNRS, Paris, France.
Cognition. 2021 Sep;214:104627. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104627. Epub 2021 May 24.
Sound is caused by physical events in the world. Do humans infer these causes when recognizing sound sources? We tested whether the recognition of common environmental sounds depends on the inference of a basic physical variable - the source intensity (i.e., the power that produces a sound). A source's intensity can be inferred from the intensity it produces at the ear and its distance, which is normally conveyed by reverberation. Listeners could thus use intensity at the ear and reverberation to constrain recognition by inferring the underlying source intensity. Alternatively, listeners might separate these acoustic cues from their representation of a sound's identity in the interest of invariant recognition. We compared these two hypotheses by measuring recognition accuracy for sounds with typically low or high source intensity (e.g., pepper grinders vs. trucks) that were presented across a range of intensities at the ear or with reverberation cues to distance. The recognition of low-intensity sources (e.g., pepper grinders) was impaired by high presentation intensities or reverberation that conveyed distance, either of which imply high source intensity. Neither effect occurred for high-intensity sources. The results suggest that listeners implicitly use the intensity at the ear along with distance cues to infer a source's power and constrain its identity. The recognition of real-world sounds thus appears to depend upon the inference of their physical generative parameters, even generative parameters whose cues might otherwise be separated from the representation of a sound's identity.
声音是由世界上的物理事件引起的。当人们识别声源时，是否会推断这些原因？我们测试了识别常见环境声音是否取决于推断基本物理变量 - 声源强度（即产生声音的功率）。可以根据声音在耳朵处产生的强度及其距离来推断声源的强度，而这通常是由混响传达的。因此，听众可以通过耳朵处的强度和混响来推断潜在的声源强度，从而限制识别。或者，为了实现不变的识别，听众可能会将这些声音线索与其声音身份的表示分离。我们通过测量在耳朵处呈现一系列强度或使用混响线索来传达距离的情况下，具有典型低或高声源强度（例如胡椒研磨器与卡车）的声音的识别准确性来比较这两个假设。高强度呈现或传达距离的混响会损害低强度声源（例如胡椒研磨器）的识别，这两种情况都意味着高强度声源。高强度声源既没有效果。结果表明，听众会隐式地使用耳朵处的强度以及距离线索来推断声源的功率并限制其身份。因此，对真实世界声音的识别似乎取决于对其物理生成参数的推断，即使这些参数的线索可能与声音身份的表示分离。
