Mid-Level Audition Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches présentée et soutenue publiquement le 21 décembre 2009 par Daniel Pressnitzer Devant le jury composé de : Bertrand Dubus Christian Lorenzi Brian C.J. Moore (Rapporteur) Israel Nelken (Rapporteur) Roy D. Patterson Shihab A. Shamma (Rapporteur) Equipe Audition: Psychophysique, Modélisation, Neurosciences (APMN) Laboratoire de Psychologie de la Perception UMR 8158 CNRS – Université Paris Descartes & Département d’Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris Tel: 01 44 32 26 73 Email:
[email protected] Summary Hearing transforms the incredibly complex superposition of acoustic sound- waves that reaches our ears into meaningful auditory scenes, inhabited by different talkers or musical melodies, for instance. During the last ten years, my research has attempted to link the properties of sound scenes (acoustical or within the peripheral auditory system) to the behavioral performance of listeners when confronted with various auditory tasks. The level of analysis can be described as mid-level, the processes that sit between an acoustical description of sound and the use of auditory information to guide behavior. Starting with auditory features, my contributions have focused on the extraction of temporal structure within sound, over different time scales. In particular, pitch perception has been studied by combining psychophysics, physiology, and modeling, and by comparing normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Then, the temporal dynamics of perceptual organization over yet longer time scales has been explored, by introducing a “bistability” paradigm, where an unchanging ambiguous stimulus produces spontaneous alternations between different percepts in the mind of the listener. This line of research again combined psychophysics and physiology, and it revealed that correlates of perceptual organization may be found very early on in the auditory pathways.