UE930 - COGSCI 307 - Auditory perception

Intervenant·e·s

• Daniel Pressnitzer [référent·e]   directeur de recherche, CNRS

How do we follow a conversation in a busy café, or recognize a long-time favourite melody from a musical piece we may not have heard for years? Even though these feats seem natural and effortless to most of us, the acoustic problems to be solved are dauntingly complex. Starting from a description of the acoustic signal and historical attempts to quantify auditory perception, we will cover classic issues such as detection thresholds, masking, pitch, timbre, to progress towards more recent strands of investigation, such as computational models of auditory processing, the consequences of hearing impairment, scene analysis, neural plasticity, memory, attention, speech coding, and music. The aim of such a broad overview, combined with the personal work from students based on discussions of recent publications, is to become aware of the many open and exciting research questions addressed by the field, and to be technically and conceptually equipped to delve more deeply into some of them if needed.

Psychoacoustics (D. Pressnitzer, classes 1, 2, 3, 10)

·       Methods and conceptual foundations: acoustics, psychophysics, functional anatomy of the peripheral auditory system

·       Elementary characteristics: masking, non-linearities, practical applications

·       Perceptual attributes: loudness, localisation, timbre

·       Auditory scene analysis, Memory

Sub-cortical processing, pitch perception (A. de Cheveigné, class 4)

·       Functional anatomy of sub-cortical auditory processing (cochlea, cochlear nucleus, olivary complex, inferior colliculus)

·       Computational modelling of sub-cortical processing

·       Pitch: behavioural data, models, neural correlates

Experimental Audiology (C. Lorenzi, classes 5, 6, 7)

·       Effects of age and cochlear damage on sound audibility, loudness perception, pitch perception and masking

·       Effects of age and cochlear damage on the temporal aspects of auditory perception and temporal-modulation processing

·       Effects of age and cochlear damage on binaural processing and auditory-space perception, perceptual grouping, auditory scene analysis and speech perception

Cortical processing: feature encoding, attention, learning (Y. Boubenec, classes 8, 9)

·       The anatomical basis of auditory cortex and its functional organization

·       The encoding of basic features of auditory objects, such as frequency content, spectral profiles and modulation properties

·       The effect of attention and learning on cortical sensory processing in the auditory cortex

Brain imaging of higher auditory functions (M. Chait, class 11)

·       Brain imaging for auditory neuroscience (EEG, MEG, fMRI)

·       Neural correlates of attention

·       Neural correlates of change detection

·       Neural correlates of speech processing

The Neurosciences of Music (classes 12, 13)

·       Elementary musical theory, related to the cognitive approach of music

·       Experimental paradigms to probe musical knowledge (behaviour, cognition vs perception)

·       Experimental data on musical perception (mostly harmony) from brain imaging

·       Implicit musical knowledge

·       Interactions between music and language processing

·       Anatomical differences due to musical expertise

·       Benefits of musical practice

Hands-on seminar

·     Discussion of an ongoing experiment with a PhD student or post-doc. Topic variable over the years (for instance, we envision EEG decoding of attention, etc.). Organised as part of Class 10 or as an additional 2-hours session, on demand.