RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Hearing Scenes: A Neuromagnetic Signature of Auditory Source and Reverberant Space Separation
JF eneuro
JO eNeuro
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP ENEURO.0007-17.2017
DO 10.1523/ENEURO.0007-17.2017
VO 4
IS 1
A1 Santani Teng
A1 Verena R. Sommer
A1 Dimitrios Pantazis
A1 Aude Oliva
YR 2017
UL http://www.eneuro.org/content/4/1/ENEURO.0007-17.2017.abstract
AB Perceiving the geometry of surrounding space is a multisensory process, crucial to contextualizing object perception and guiding navigation behavior. Humans can make judgments about surrounding spaces from reverberation cues, caused by sounds reflecting off multiple interior surfaces. However, it remains unclear how the brain represents reverberant spaces separately from sound sources. Here, we report separable neural signatures of auditory space and source perception during magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording as subjects listened to brief sounds convolved with monaural room impulse responses (RIRs). The decoding signature of sound sources began at 57 ms after stimulus onset and peaked at 130 ms, while space decoding started at 138 ms and peaked at 386 ms. Importantly, these neuromagnetic responses were readily dissociable in form and time: while sound source decoding exhibited an early and transient response, the neural signature of space was sustained and independent of the original source that produced it. The reverberant space response was robust to variations in sound source, and vice versa, indicating a generalized response not tied to specific source-space combinations. These results provide the first neuromagnetic evidence for robust, dissociable auditory source and reverberant space representations in the human brain and reveal the temporal dynamics of how auditory scene analysis extracts percepts from complex naturalistic auditory signals.