Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sensorimotor Engagement Facilitates Regularity Detection During Auditory Scene Analysis

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Berfin Bastug¹ (berfin.bastug@esi-frankfurt.de), Yue Sun¹, Erich Schroeger³, David Poeppel^1,2; ¹Ernst Struengmann Institute for Neuroscience, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, ²Department of Psychology, New York University, ³Wilhelm-Wundt-Institute of Psychology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

One challenge the auditory system faces derives from the fact that acoustic input typically lacks clear boundaries. A central goal is therefore to decompose the input and identify perceptually meaningful units, a process known as Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA). A body of research suggests that the detection of temporal regularities in auditory stimuli facilitates ASA. Here, we explored factors that modulate regularity detection using so-called ‘tone cloud’ stimuli —sequences of randomly generated clusters of 50-ms pure tones, and the possible sensorimotor contribution (requiring detection and concurrent tapping). Temporal regularity was introduced by periodically repeating a proportion of tones within each tone cloud. We manipulated two variables: (i) repetition rate, determined by tone cloud durations (0.4 s, 0.7 s, 1 s), and (ii) the percentage of repeated tones (0% to 100%). This created a gradient from fully repeated to continuous streams, with intermediate conditions involving partially frozen and regenerated tones. The frozen tones formed the signal to detect, while newly generated tones added background noise. Participants completed two psychophysical experiments: detection and tapping. The results reveal sigmoidal, quasi-categorical performance across percentage levels in both experiments. Inflection points shifted with repetition periods. While the performance patterns in both experiments were similar, sensorimotor involvement in fact lowered the threshold for detecting repetition. These findings suggest that the signal required to perceive repetition depends on tone cloud duration and that sensorimotor engagement improves the detection of repeating patterns and the formation of perceptual boundaries.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition