Time-dependent discrimination advantages for harmonic sounds suggest efficient coding for memory

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• Paul Bays
• Wednesday 28 June 2023, 15:00-16:00
• Zoom link: www.bayslab.org/craikjc.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Adam Triabhall.

This week we will discuss and debate a recent paper by McPherson and McDermott, published in PNAS (2020).

Abstract: “Perceptual systems have finite memory resources and must store incoming signals in compressed formats. To explore whether representations of a sound’s pitch might derive from this need for compression, we compared discrimination of harmonic and inharmonic sounds across delays. In contrast to inharmonic spectra, harmonic spectra can be summarized, and thus compressed, using their fundamental frequency (f0). Participants heard two sounds and judged which was higher. Despite being comparable for sounds presented back-to-back, discrimination was better for harmonic than inharmonic stimuli when sounds were separated in time, implicating memory representations unique to harmonic sounds. Patterns of individual differences (correlations between thresholds in different conditions) indicated that listeners use different representations depending on the time delay between sounds, directly comparing the spectra of temporally adjacent sounds, but transitioning to comparing f0s across delays. The need to store sound in memory appears to determine reliance on f0-based pitch and may explain its importance in music, in which listeners must extract relationships between notes separated in time” (McPherson & McDermott, 2020).

Reference: McPherson, M.J., & McDermott, J.H. (2020). Time-dependent discrimination advantages for harmonic sounds suggest efficient coding for memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 117(50), 32169–32180. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2008956117

This talk is part of the The Craik Journal Club series.

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• The Craik Journal Club
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