Old plus new: The interplay of regularly extraction and auditory object formation

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The proposed project will investigate the decomposition of auditory scenes into single objects, such as speech and background music in a movie. Different acoustic sources show different sound emission patterns, and the resulting regular patterns within concurrent sounds are possible cues for source distinction. Accordingly, it has been suggested that object formation is supported by pre-attentive regularity extraction in the auditory system. This hypothesis will, for the first time, be tested in the proposed project. In this novel approach, previous findings on regularity extraction and in auditory object formation will be combined to test functional relations between the two. Six experiments will be conducted using behavioural responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) in healthy adult participants and ERPs in newborn infants. Key objectives are to reveal the conditions under which regularity extraction contributes to object formation, to evaluate the interaction of regularity-based object formation with other grouping principles (such as Gestalt rules and instantaneous harmonicity), and to determine which of these mechanisms are already present at birth. The project will advance our understanding of auditory perception in natural situations, and will be relevant for applications such as hearing aids and communication devices.