An auditory-visual tradeoff in susceptibility to clutter
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2021-12-07
Authors
Zhang, Min
Denison, Rachel N.
Pelli, Denis G.
Le, Thuy Tien C.
Ihlefeld, Antje
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
M. Zhang, R.N. Denison, D.G. Pelli, T.T.C. Le, A. Ihlefeld. 2021. "An auditory-visual tradeoff in susceptibility to clutter.." Sci Rep, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp. 23540 - ?. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-00328-0
Abstract
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.
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© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.