Confidence in auditory perceptual completion
Wed—HZ_10—Talks9—9701
Presented by: Cemre Baykan
Perceptual completion is a phenomenon in which the brain fills in the gaps in sensory information that are either caused internally because of the lack of receptors, or externally by (self)-occlusion in the environment. Previous studies have shown that observers report higher confidence for perceptually completed than veridical visual stimuli, while being unaware of the missing sensory information. Here, we investigated whether similar metacognitive biases would emerge in auditory completion. We ran two separate experiments using stimuli that were uninterrupted or interrupted tones, both accompanied by noise. In Experiment 1, participants performed a continuity-discontinuity decision and a confidence rating for a single stimulus. In Experiment 2, they performed continuity-discontinuity decisions for two consecutive stimuli and made a forced-choice confidence judgment selecting the decision they felt more confident about. We found that the interrupted sounds with a masking noise were reported frequently as uninterrupted, implying auditory completion. Confidence ratings in the first experiment correlated with response consistency in the continuity-discontinuity decisions. Forced-choice confidence judgments in the second experiment showed that participants were not able to distinguish the filled-in stimulus from a continuous stimulus with a similar masking noise. Most importantly, there was no clear preference for a veridical compared to a perceptually completed stimulus. Our results extend the findings from the visual modality, demonstrating that listeners are unaware of auditory completion and trust filled-in information as much as veridical information in audition.
Keywords: auditory continuity illusion, temporal induction, metacognition, auditory confidence