EEG-based Measurement of Auditory Saliency in a Complex Context

• Main Authors: Huang, Xun-Yi, 黃薰誼
• Other Authors: Lin, Wen-Chieh
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/sn3p45

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 多媒體工程研究所 === 103 === Auditory saliency is an important mechanism for helping human extract relevant information in a particular auditory environment. Pre-attentive/bottom-up saliency, which occurs automatically in human auditory system, does not require humans to pay attention to audio stimuli. Behavioral studies, in which subjects are asked to determine a more salient sound after hearing two sounds, is commonly applied to measure or evaluate auditory saliency; however, behavioral studies may not truly reflect pre-attentive saliency because the subjects’ decision process often involves some complicate cognitive processes and behavioral responses only provide limited observations. Thus, a better measurement method for pre-attentive auditory saliency is necessary. In this study, we propose an electroencephalography-based approach that can complement behavioral studies to provide a more elaborate analysis of auditory saliency. We used two types of neural responses to detect subjects’ auditory perceptual responses: mismatch negativity (MMN) for pre-attentive processing and P3a for attention shifting. We demonstrate our method with an EEG experiment that measures MMN and P3a of measured sounds in two realistic-like scenarios, including carriage in a massive rapid transportation (MRT) and cabin in a car. The results of this study exhibit that MMN and P3a provide more detailed information for deeply exploring bottom-up saliency. We also believe that our study could provide novel insights at the view of three perspectives of saliency : pre-attentive, attentive, and behavioral saliency.