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Auditory gap detection: psychometric functions and insights into the underlying neural activity

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Abstract

The detection of a silent interval or gap provides important insight into temporal processing by the auditory system. Previous research has uncovered a multitude of empirical findings leaving the mechanism of gap detection poorly understood and key issues unresolved. Here, we expand the findings by measuring psychometric functions for a number of conditions including both across-frequency and across-intensity gap detection as a first study of its kind. A model is presented which not only accounts for our findings in a quantitative manner, but also helps frame the body of work on auditory gap research. The model is based on the peripheral response and postulates that the identification of gap requires the detection of activity associated with silence.

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Notes

  1. One might ask why detection is not carried out in the manner of a single sample t test: an estimate of the sample mean is obtained during the marker, and a single comparison is made against the ISI obtained during silence. However, such a test is only possible if the observer already knows when is marker and when is silence, and thus this strategy is not suitable in the present case. Our model, on the other hand, requires the listener to know the values of \(\mu _m\) and \(s_m\). We simply assume that these parameters are learned through the practice trials conducted prior to the start of the experiment.

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Correspondence to Willy Wong.

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Funding

The research was supported by a research grant from the Kawai Foundation for Sound Technology and Music, Grants-in-Aid of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Scientific Research 25240023 and 21330169 to S.M., Grants-in-Aid of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Scientific Research 25350017 to N.H. and a Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant 458039 to W.W.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Communicated by Benjamin Lindner.

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Mori, S., Kikuchi, Y., Hirose, N. et al. Auditory gap detection: psychometric functions and insights into the underlying neural activity. Biol Cybern 112, 575–584 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-018-0786-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-018-0786-6

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