Name: Yousef Mohammadi (Honorary Research Associate, UCL

Research Associate, Newcastle University)

Title: Cortical sensitivity to statistics of natural sounds

Abstract: Natural sound textures (rain, fire) contain statistical structure. Psychophysics studies have shown that imposing these statistics on white noise produces synthetic sounds that are perceptually similar to the original texture. Growing evidence suggests the subcortical regions in the auditory pathway are sensitive to these statistics, but less is known about how the human auditory cortex represents them. In this talk, I will first review a computational model of sound texture (McDermott & Simoncelli, 2011) and the types of statistics introduced in that work. I will then present our recent fMRI study (Mohammadi et al., 2026), in which we parametrically varied statistics of synthetic sound textures and measured brain responses. I will discuss what these results tell us about how texture statistics are represented across the auditory cortex. Finally, I will present our unpublished work on working memory for sound textures and discuss the possible involvement of medial temporal lobe regions.

Website / links:

BlueSky: yousef-mhm.bsky

LinkedIn: yousef-m-6a40b328a