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Abstract:
It is known that humans can make finer discriminations
between familiar sounds (e.g. syllables) than between unfamiliar
ones (e.g. different noise segments). Here we show that a
corresponding enhancement is present in early auditory processing
stages. Based on previous work which demonstrated that natural
sounds had robust statistical properties that could be quantified,
we hypothesize that the auditory system exploits those properties
to construct efficient neural codes. To test this hypothesis, we
measure the information rate carried by auditory spike trains on
narrow-band stimuli whose amplitude modulation has naturalistic
characteristics, and compare it to the information rate on stimuli
with non-naturalistic modulation. We find that naturalistic inputs
significantly enhance the rate of transmitted information,
indicating that auditory neural responses are matched to
characteristics of natural auditory scenes.
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