The same acoustic stimulus can be sorted by different features for different perceptual goals

Evidence

Perceptual grouping is a form of feature-based stimulus segmentation that determines whether acoustic events will be grouped into a single sound or be segregated into distinct sounds (Bregman 1990 ). … In auditory categorization, sounds are classified based on their acoustic features or more processed forms of information (e.g., semantic knowledge), providing an efficient means to interact with stimuli in our environment (Ashby and Berretty 1997 ; Gifford et al. 2014 ). For example, when we hear the word “Groningen” from different speakers, we can categorize the gender of each speaker based on the pitch of the speaker’s voice. On the other hand, to analyze the linguistic content transmitted by a speech sound, we can ignore the unique pitch, timbre etc. of each speaker and categorize the sound into the distinct word category “Groningen”. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4879

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines perceptual grouping and auditory categorization as distinct computational processes in the auditory brain.