Auditory salience using natural scenes: An online study
Abstract
Salience is the quality of a sensory signal that attracts involuntary attention in humans. While it primarily reflects conspicuous physical attributes of a scene, our understanding of processes underlying what makes a certain object or event salient remains limited. In the vision literature, experimental results, theoretical accounts, and large amounts of eye-tracking data using rich stimuli have shed light on some of the underpinnings of visual salience in the brain. In contrast, studies of auditory salience have lagged behind due to limitations in both experimental designs and stimulus datasets used to probe the question of salience in complex everyday soundscapes. In this work, we deploy an online platform to study salience using a dichotic listening paradigm with natural auditory stimuli. The study validates crowd-sourcing as a reliable platform to collect behavioral responses to auditory salience by comparing experimental outcomes to findings acquired in a controlled laboratory setting. A model-based analysis demonstrates the benefits of extending behavioral measures of salience to broader selection of auditory scenes and larger pools of subjects. Overall, this effort extends our current knowledge of auditory salience in everyday soundscapes and highlights the limitations of low-level acoustic attributes in capturing the richness of natural soundscapes.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2021
- Source ID
- 10.1121/10.0006750
Entities
People
- Mounya Elhilali
- Nicholas Huang
- Sandeep Reddy Kothinti
Organizations
- Johns Hopkins University
- National Institutes of Health
- Office of Naval Research