Perceptual sensitivity is explained by optimization for ecological tasks
Saddler, M. R.; Dau, T.; McDermott, J. H.
Show abstract
When asked to discriminate between two stimuli that differ along some dimension, such as intensity, frequency, or orientation, humans exhibit a smallest stimulus difference, or threshold, below which discrimination becomes impossible. These limits on perceptual sensitivity have traditionally been explained by internal noise. Contemporary theories instead link perceptual sensitivity to efficient coding of the natural environment but have not been comprehensively tested. Here, we measured the psychoacoustic sensitivity of a computational model optimized for everyday sound localization and recognition tasks. We used linear classifiers operating on the model's learned representations to estimate 1632 thresholds spanning the perceptual dimensions of sound. These model-derived thresholds closely matched thresholds measured behaviorally in humans on the same test battery. The results show that many classical psychophysical phenomena emerge from representations optimized for natural behavior and suggest that discrimination thresholds are determined by linear separability in these optimized representations, rather than intrinsic neural noise.
Matching journals
The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.