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Quadri-stability of a spatially ambiguous auditory illusion

Overview of attention for article published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, January 2015
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  • In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (90th percentile)
  • Good Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (79th percentile)

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Title
Quadri-stability of a spatially ambiguous auditory illusion
Published in
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, January 2015
DOI 10.3389/fnhum.2014.01060
Pubmed ID
Authors

Constance M. Bainbridge, Wilma A. Bainbridge, Aude Oliva

Abstract

In addition to vision, audition plays an important role in sound localization in our world. One way we estimate the motion of an auditory object moving towards or away from us is from changes in volume intensity. However, the human auditory system has unequally distributed spatial resolution, including difficulty distinguishing sounds in front vs. behind the listener. Here, we introduce a novel quadri-stable illusion, the Transverse-and-Bounce Auditory Illusion, which combines front-back confusion with changes in volume levels of a nonspatial sound to create ambiguous percepts of an object approaching and withdrawing from the listener. The sound can be perceived as traveling transversely from front to back or back to front, or "bouncing" to remain exclusively in front of or behind the observer. Here we demonstrate how human listeners experience this illusory phenomenon by comparing ambiguous and unambiguous stimuli for each of the four possible motion percepts. When asked to rate their confidence in perceiving each sound's motion, participants reported equal confidence for the illusory and unambiguous stimuli. Participants perceived all four illusory motion percepts, and could not distinguish the illusion from the unambiguous stimuli. These results show that this illusion is effectively quadri-stable. In a second experiment, the illusory stimulus was looped continuously in headphones while participants identified its perceived path of motion to test properties of perceptual switching, locking, and biases. Participants were biased towards perceiving transverse compared to bouncing paths, and they became perceptually locked into alternating between front-to-back and back-to-front percepts, perhaps reflecting how auditory objects commonly move in the real world. This multi-stable auditory illusion opens opportunities for studying the perceptual, cognitive, and neural representation of objects in motion, as well as exploring multimodal perceptual awareness.

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Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 27 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 27 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Ph. D. Student 6 22%
Student > Master 4 15%
Student > Doctoral Student 3 11%
Researcher 3 11%
Student > Bachelor 2 7%
Other 4 15%
Unknown 5 19%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Psychology 12 44%
Medicine and Dentistry 3 11%
Neuroscience 2 7%
Engineering 2 7%
Arts and Humanities 1 4%
Other 3 11%
Unknown 4 15%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 13. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 05 January 2016.
All research outputs
#2,278,215
of 22,774,233 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
#1,156
of 7,141 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#36,934
of 379,757 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
#37
of 178 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,774,233 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 89th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 7,141 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 14.5. This one has done well, scoring higher than 83% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 379,757 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 178 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 79% of its contemporaries.