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Schema learning for the cocktail party problem

Significance The “cocktail party problem” is encountered when sounds from different sources in the world mix in the air before arriving at the ear, requiring the brain to estimate individual sources from the received mixture. Sounds produced by a given source often exhibit consistencies in structure that might be useful for separating sources if they could be learned. Here we show that listeners rapidly learn the abstract structure shared by sounds from novel sources and use the learned structure to extract these sounds when they appear in mixtures. The involvement of learning and memory in our ability to hear one sound among many opens an avenue to understanding the role of statistical regularities in auditory scene analysis. The cocktail party problem requires listeners to infer individual sound sources from mixtures of sound. The problem can be solved only by leveraging regularities in natural sound sources, but little is known about how such regularities are internalized. We explored whether listeners learn source “schemas”—the abstract structure shared by different occurrences of the same type of sound source—and use them to infer sources from mixtures. We measured the ability of listeners to segregate mixtures of time-varying sources. In each experiment a subset of trials contained schema-based sources generated from a common template by transformations (transposition and time dilation) that introduced acoustic variation but preserved abstract structure. Across several tasks and classes of sound sources, schema-based sources consistently aided source separation, in some cases producing rapid improvements in performance over the first few exposures to a schema. Learning persisted across blocks that did not contain the learned schema, and listeners were able to learn and use multiple schemas simultaneously. No learning was evident when schema were presented in the task-irrelevant (i.e., distractor) source. However, learning from task-relevant stimuli showed signs of being implicit, in that listeners were no more likely to report that sources recurred in experiments containing schema-based sources than in control experiments containing no schema-based sources. The results implicate a mechanism for rapidly internalizing abstract sound structure, facilitating accurate perceptual organization of sound sources that recur in the environment.