Rule establishment for an higher-order sound feature: Sound familiarity
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1
Institute for Psychology I, University of Leipzig, Germany
Sound familiarity is a precondition to extract semantic information from the auditory environment. We tested whether the familiarity status of spectrally and temporally complex sounds is pre-attentively extracted and whether a rule is established against which non-physical familiarity changes are detected.
Twelve different familiar sounds (animal vocalizations) and twelve specifically constructed, physically matched, yet unfamiliar control sounds were presented. Participants watched a silent, subtitled movie. In each block, ten of twelve presented sounds had a standard familiarity status (familiar or unfamiliar; 83% of the trials) and the two remaining sounds had a respectively opposite, deviant familiarity status (17% of the trials). As each of the twelve individual sounds occurred with an equal probability of 8.3%, familiarity deviants were no physical deviants.
Familiar sounds generally elicited enhanced ERP responses in the N1 and P2 range. However, the observed scalp distributions indicated that these effects were independent from the obligatory N1 and P2. Familiarity deviants elicited a negative change-detection response maximal over parietal areas. This response was observed at a latency of 210 to 250 ms and did not differ for familiar deviants in the context of unfamiliar standards or unfamiliar deviants in the context of familiar standards.
The data indicate that sound familiarity is pre-attentively accessed and that incoming sounds are pre-attentively matched to the existence of auditory long-term memory traces. Note that such a familiarity effect does not necessarily rely on the extraction of sound meaning. Remarkably, the present effects were observed for a large set of physically variable, spectrally and temporally complex environmental sounds. A rule for the familiarity status was extracted and new incoming sounds were tested against this rule, independently of the direction of change.
Conference:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Presentations
Citation:
Kirmse
U,
Jacobsen
T and
Schroger
E
(2009). Rule establishment for an higher-order sound feature: Sound familiarity.
Conference Abstract:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.129
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Received:
26 Mar 2009;
Published Online:
26 Mar 2009.
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Correspondence:
Ursula Kirmse, Institute for Psychology I, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, ukirmse@uni-leipzig.de