Ressources.ircam

Answer: no, or at least not yet. I will discuss a wide range of applications for reverse-correlation methods, spanning an equally wide range of daunting interpretational challenges. Although very substantial progress has been made over the past 20 years in characterizing and understanding results from reversecorrelation experiments, I will highlight how much is still unresolved when attempting conceptual leaps between circuits and behaviour, artificial stimuli and natural statistics, vision and audition. It is tempting to make these connections on the basis of data-rich and seemingly transparent characterizations of the sensory process such as those typically returned by reverse correlating noise, but a closer look at the technicalities involved prompts caution and the need for more experimental as well as theoretical work.

- - -
About reverse-correlation:

The reverse correlation technique was first introduced in neurophysiology to characterize neuronal receptive fields (Eggermont et al, 1983). It was then extended by psychophysicians to characterize sensory systems, using behavioral choices (e.g., yes/no responses) instead of neuronal spikes as the systems’ output variables, with applications to a wide variety of low-level tasks in the auditory domain, e.g. detection of tones in noise (Ahumada & Lovel, 1971), discrimination of frequency distributions (Berg, 1989), or spectro-temporal loudness weighting in fluctuating noises and tones (e.g. Oberfeld et al., 2012; Ponsot et al., 2013). In the visual domain, these techniques have quickly been extended to address not only low-level sensory processes, but full-fledged cognitive mechanisms: facial recognition (Mangini & Biederman, 2004), facial emotional expression (Jack et al., 2009, 21012a; Gosselin & Schyns, 2001) or social traits (Dotsch & Todorov, 2012).

Unlike in vision, the use of reverse-correlation in high-level auditory cognition of complex, natural stimuli like speech or music is still very much an emerging theme, with only a handful of very recent studies. By bringing together the main practitioners of this emerging community, these two days in Paris aim to move beyond the stage of relatively isolated proofs-of-concept, to mutualize everybody’s experience and create a roadmap for future research applying reverse-correlation techniques to high-level audio cognition.