Journal Article

An auditory-visual tradeoff in susceptibility to clutter

Pelli, Denis G, Le, Thuy Tien C, Ihlefeld, Antje, Denison, Rachel N, Zhang, Min

2021

Overview

Sensory cortical mechanisms combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects. This is difficult in noisy or cluttered environments. Knowing that individuals vary greatly in their susceptibility to clutter, we wondered whether there might be a relation between an individual’s auditory and visual susceptibilities to clutter. In auditory masking , background sound makes spoken words unrecognizable. When masking arises due to interference at central auditory processing stages, beyond the cochlea, it is called informational masking. A strikingly similar phenomenon in vision, called visual crowding , occurs when nearby clutter makes a target object unrecognizable, despite being resolved at the retina. We here compare susceptibilities to auditory informational masking and visual crowding in the same participants. Surprisingly, across participants, we find a negative correlation ( R = –0.7) between susceptibility to informational masking and crowding: Participants who have low susceptibility to auditory clutter tend to have high susceptibility to visual clutter, and vice versa. This reveals a tradeoff in the brain between auditory and visual processing.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group,Nature Portfolio
• Subject: 631/378/2613 / 631/378/2619 / 631/378/2649 / 631/378/3917 / 631/477/2811 / Adult / Attention - physiology / Auditory Perception - physiology / Biomedical engineering / Brain - physiology / Cochlea / Crowding / Female / Hearing / Humanities and Social Sciences / Humans / Information processing / Male / multidisciplinary / Noise / Perceptual Masking - physiology / Retina / Science / Science (multidisciplinary) / Sensory integration / Sound / Speech / Susceptibility / Vision, Ocular - physiology / Visual Perception - physiology / Young Adult