16 May 2013

Jordi Navarra, from Fundació Sant Joan de Déu, gives a talk on "Temporal & spatial re-encoding of sound" on Thursday May 16th 2013, at 3:30pm in room 52.321.

Abstract: Our perception is always a reconstruction of our surrounding World. Two of best examples to illustrate this idea are the 'temporal recalibration of sensory signals' and the 'spatial encoding of pitch'. Regarding temporal recalibration, we showed that our response to auditory stimuli can speed-up or slow-down after adaptation to audiovisual asynchrony, perhaps reflecting that the processing of auditory signals accommodates to the visual processing time (see Navarra et al., PNAS, 2009). This may be due to the fact that visual information provides the perceiver with a better estimate of the time of occurrence of distant (audiovisual) stimuli. Regarding the spatial encoding of pitch, I am currently investigating how the "ups and downs” (in pitch) in complex auditory signals such as music or speech are remapped into spatial coordinates. In a recent study, we demonstrated that the spatial representation of high and low tones embedded in melodies can influence the spatial processing of visual stimuli.

Jordi Navarra webpage