The perceptual and cerebral representation of natural sounds

titleThe perceptual and cerebral representation of natural sounds
start_date2022/09/22
schedule16h30-17h30
onlineno
summaryEvery day, we are exposed to largely diverse natural sounds (e.g., whooshes, chirps, impulses, rapidly modulated harmonic signals) and recognise sound generating objects and events in the environment (e.g., a gust of wind, birds, a nail being hammered, someone speaking). Understanding their perception and neural representation has been the goal of my research since the beginning of my career. I will start this talk with a brief overview of my research portfolio ranging from the psychophysics of impacted and walked-upon objects and of musical timbre, to the neuroimaging of multisensory processes (MEG) and of emotions in voices (fMRI+MEG). I will then present two studies aiming to disentangle the relative importance of acoustic and semantic information in the perception and neuroimaging (fMRI) of natural sounds. Finally, I will describe in detail a recent analysis of behavioural and neuroimaging (fMRI) data that contrasted the representation of a wide range of computational models, ranging from acoustics to natural language processing models, to sound-to-event deep neural networks.
responsiblesTaverna