Behavioral and neural peculiarities of auditory looming perception in humans

Karolina Ignatiadis , Brigitta Toth (1, 2) , Robert Baumgartner (3)

1 MTA - Hungarian Academy of Sciences
2 University of Pannonia
3 OeAW - Austrian Academy of Sciences

The auditory system constantly monitors the environment to protect us from harmful events such as collisions with approaching objects. Auditory looming bias is an astoundingly fast perceptual bias favoring approaching compared to receding sonic motion and was demonstrated behaviorally even in infants of four months in age. Previous investigations of behavioral and neural correlates of said bias exclusively manipulated overall sound intensity, despite our pioneering work demonstrating that spectral manipulations maintaining overall sound intensity can also induce looming bias. Very recent neural investigations based on intensity ramps suggest that prefrontal cortex plays an important role in eliciting looming bias by causing a functional override in auditory cortex. Here, we show results of testing the generalizability of that neural mechanism to spectrally induced biases and discuss the potential of looming paradigms to study developmental aspects of spatial hearing.

Mots clés: auditory looming bias; electroencephalography; functional connectivity; development; auditory looming bias

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Vibrations [physics.class-ph]

Karolina Ignatiadis, Brigitta Toth, Robert Baumgartner. Behavioral and neural peculiarities of auditory looming perception in humans. Forum Acusticum, Dec 2020, Lyon, France. pp.907-911, ⟨10.48465/fa.2020.0292⟩. ⟨hal-03234202⟩