Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Extracting Regularities from Relevant and Irrelevant Sequences of Sound

16:30 - 18:00

From Is to Ought: Grounding Rules in Regularities

Room: HSZ - N3

Chair/s:

Roland Pfister

Theories on how the human mind represents behavioral rules and norms distinguish between explicit, verbal formats and implicit, procedural formats. Here we ask whether the latter representational format draws on fundamental cognitive mechanisms of regularity detection and statistical learning. The symposium thus connects basic, low-level approaches from cognitive psychology to the concepts of rules and rule-guided behavior. The speakers will cover cognitive fundamentals of rule representations, principles of regularity detection and rule discovery in streams of incoming stimulation, procedural learning of rules through mental simulation, and challenges derived from using negated rather than affirmative rules to steer human behavior. The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies, from movement trajectory analysis to peripheral physiology (EMG) and neuroscientific approaches (EEG, fMRI) to elucidate the question of how much rule representations draw on implicit, procedural learning.

Submission 275

Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Extracting Regularities from Relevant and Irrelevant Sequences of Sound

SymposiumTalk-03

Presented by: Max Schulz

Max Schulz ^{1, 2}, Jonas Obleser ^{1, 2}, Malte Wöstmann ^{1, 2}

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Germany

² Center of Brain, Behavior and Metabolism, University of Lübeck, Germany

The human auditory system is constantly exposed to a wide variety of sounds. Some sounds are behaviourally relevant, while others are irrelevant and potentially distracting. Since processing capacities are limited, the auditory system is hypothesized to rely on inter-trial dependencies in sound sequences to support enhancement of relevant sound and suppression of distraction. We investigate how the recent history of sensory input modulates the deployment of reactive attentional capture and suppression. On every trial, participants (n = 34) searched for an amplitude-modulated target sound presented simultaneously with salient and non-salient distractors (German spoken monosyllabic number words). Behaviorally, we observed distractor suppression as decreased performance in trials where the current target shared features with the distractor from the previous trial (i.e., negative priming). Target enhancement surfaced in increased performance in trials where the current target shared features with the previous target (i.e., positive priming). Over the course of the experiment, performance in trials with distractors relatively increased, indicating a gradual transition from attentional capture to more successful distractor suppression. In the electroencephalogram (EEG), lateral targets evoked an N2ac component in the event-related potential (ERP), speaking to reactive attentional enhancement. In contrast, lateral distractors evoked a distractor positivity (Pd) component, which has previously been associated with reactive inhibitory attentional processing in the visual modality. In summary, we demonstrate that the auditory system utilizes spatiotemporal inter-trial dependencies to reactively enhance relevant sounds, while suppressing distractors.

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