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An oscillatory correlation model of auditory streaming

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Abstract

We present a neurocomputational model for auditory streaming, which is a prominent phenomenon of auditory scene analysis. The proposed model represents auditory scene analysis by oscillatory correlation, where a perceptual stream corresponds to a synchronized assembly of neural oscillators and different streams correspond to desynchronized oscillator assemblies. The underlying neural architecture is a two-dimensional network of relaxation oscillators with lateral excitation and global inhibition, where one dimension represents time and another dimension frequency. By employing dynamic connections along the frequency dimension and a random element in global inhibition, the proposed model produces a temporal coherence boundary and a fissure boundary that closely match those from the psychophysical data of auditory streaming. Several issues are discussed, including how to represent physical time and how to relate shifting synchronization to auditory attention.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported in part by an AFRL grant via Veridian and an AFOSR Grant (FA9550-04-01-0117). We thank Z. Jin for his assistance in figure preparation.

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Center for Cognitive Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    DeLiang Wang & Peter Chang

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  1. DeLiang Wang
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Correspondence to DeLiang Wang.

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Wang, D., Chang, P. An oscillatory correlation model of auditory streaming. Cogn Neurodyn 2, 7–19 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-007-9035-8

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