Abstract
The effects of auditory context on the preattentive and perceptual organization of tone sequences were investigated. Two sets of experiments were conducted in which the pitch of contextual tones was varied, bringing about two different contextual manipulations. Preattentive auditory organization was indexed by the mismatch negativity event-related potential, which is elicited by violations of auditory regularities even when participants ignore the sounds (e.g., by reading a book). The perceptual effects of the contextual manipulations on auditory grouping were assessed using target-detection and orderjudgment tasks. The close correspondence found between the effects of auditory context on the perceptual and preattentive measures of auditory grouping suggests that a large part of contextual processing is preattentive.
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This research was supported by the National Science Research Fund of Hungary (OTKA T034112), the Academy of Finland, and the National Institutes of Health (Grants R01 DC04263 and R01 NS30029-23).
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Winkler, I., Sussman, E., Tervaniemi, M. et al. Preattentive auditory context effects. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 3, 57–77 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.3.1.57
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.3.1.57