Salient auditory objects

Photos depict non-biological sound-producing action events that scale (bottom-to-top) from scene-like to object-like, based on ratings of the corresponding action sounds. This includes two sub-categories of actions: mechanical (blue; human-made) and environmental (green). Colored brain regions depict functionally defined regions (using fMRI) involved in different aspects of hearing perception: white=tonotopically organized cortex (primary auditory cortices); dotted white outline=Heschl’s gyrus; green=preferential activation to environmental (vs mechanical) action sounds; blue=preferential activation to mechanical (vs environmental) action sounds; yellow=regions showing parametrically increasing sensitivity to the more object-like perceptual ratings of sound, independent of the action sound category. For details see Lewis et al., (2012) Auditory objects salience: human cortical processing of non-biological action sounds and their acoustic signal attributes. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. Vol. 6, Article 27