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 changes over time (pitch motion). Here, using psychophysics, computational modelling, functional neuroimaging and analysis of recorded speech, we ask whether 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. In psychophysical experiments, we discovered that humans can judge pitch direction from spectrotemporal intensity correlations. Robust sensitivity to negative spectrotemporal correlations is a direct analogue of illusory 'reverse-phi' motion in vision, constituting a new auditory illusion. Functional MRI measurements in audit

SUBMITTER: Vaziri PA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12932110 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature