Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch.

ABSTRACT: To discern speech or appreciate music, the human auditory system detects how pitch increases or decreases over time. However, the algorithms used to detect changes in pitch, or pitch motion, are incompletely understood. Here, using psychophysics, computational modeling, functional neuroimaging, and analysis of recorded speech, we ask if humans can detect pitch motion using computations analogous to those used by the visual system. We adapted stimuli from studies of vision to create novel auditory correlated noise stimuli that elicited robust pitch motion percepts. Crucially, these stimuli are inharmonic and possess no persistent features across frequency or time, but do possess positive or negative local spectrotemporal correlations in intensity. In psychophysical experiments, we found cle

SUBMITTER: Vaziri PA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11312537 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature