Bayesian prior uncertainty and surprisal elicit distinct neural patterns during sound localization in dynamic environments

Scientific Reports, vol. 15, pp. 7931

Abstract

Estimating the location of a stimulus is a key function in sensory processing, and widely considered to result from the integration of prior information and sensory input according to Bayesian principles. A deviation of sensory input from the prior elicits surprisal, depending on the uncertainty of the prior. While this mechanism is increasingly understood in the visual domain, much less is known about its implementation in audition, especially regarding spatial localization. Here, we combined human EEG with computational modeling to study auditory spatial inference in a noisy, volatile environment and analyzed behavioral and neural patterns associated with prior uncertainty and surprisal. First, our results demonstrate that participants indeed used prior information during periods of stable environmental statistics, but showed evidence of surprisal and discarded prior information following environmental changes. Second, we observed distinct EEG activity patterns associated with prior uncertainty and surprisal in both the time- and time-frequency domain, which are in line with previous studies using visual tasks. Third, these EEG activity patterns were predictive of our participants' sound localization error, response uncertainty, and prior bias on a trial-by-trial basis. In summary, our work provides novel behavioral and neural evidence for Bayesian inference during dynamic auditory localization.

Authors 6

1. Burcu Bayram corresponding

   University of Vienna

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. burcu.bayram@univie.ac.at

   Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

2. David Meijer

   Austrian Academy of Sciences · Acoustics Research Institute

   Affiliation as printed

   Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria

3. Roberto Barumerli

   University of Verona · Austrian Academy of Sciences · Acoustics Research Institute

   Affiliation as printed

   Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria

   Department of Neurosciences, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy

4. Michelle J. Spierings Aachen Department of Animal Sciences Institute for Biology Leiden

   Leiden University · University of Vienna

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Animal Sciences, Institute for Biology Leiden, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

   Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

5. Robert Baumgartner

   Austrian Academy of Sciences · Acoustics Research Institute

   Affiliation as printed

   Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria

6. Ulrich Pomper

   University of Vienna

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria