title: Auditory gist: recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues.
abstract: Sounds such as the voice or musical instruments can be recognized on the basis of timbre alone. Here, sound recognition was investigated with severely reduced timbre cues. Short snippets of naturally recorded sounds were extracted from a large corpus. Listeners were asked to report a target category (e.g., sung voices) among other sounds (e.g., musical instruments). All sound categories covered the same pitch range, so the task had to be solved on timbre cues alone. The minimum duration for which performance was above chance was found to be short, on the order of a few milliseconds, with the best performance for voice targets. Performance was independent of pitch and was maintained when stimuli contained less than a full waveform cycle. Recognition was not generally better when the sound snippets were time-aligned with the sound onset compared to when they were extracted with a random starting time. Finally, performance did not depend on feedback or training, suggesting that the cues used by listeners in the artificial gating task were similar to those relevant for longer, more familiar sounds. The results show that timbre cues for sound recognition are available at a variety of time scales, including very short ones.
authors.affiliation: Institut de Recherche Biomédicale des Armées, Département Action et Cognition en Situation Opérationnelle, 91223 Brétigny sur Orge, France.
authors.forename: Clara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Suied
authors.affiliation: Sonic Arts Research Centre, School of Creative Arts, 1 Cloreen Park, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Trevor R
authors.initials: TR
authors.lastname: Agus
authors.affiliation: Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, UMR 5549, CNRS and Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France.
authors.forename: Simon J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Thorpe
authors.affiliation: Departments of Neurological Surgery and Physiology, UCSF Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143.
authors.forename: Nima
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mesgarani
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, UMR 8248, CNRS and École normale supérieure, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pressnitzer
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001299:Audiometry; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D030141:Feedback, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D055139:Sensory Gating; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D063346:Singing; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult