Decoding ambiguity: Behavioral insights into contextual priors in auditory perception

Contextual priors play a critical role in auditory perception, shaping how we interpret and understand sounds based on expectations informed by previous contexts or prior experiences. While much remains unknown about how past cues influence the processing of current sensory information, ambiguous sounds present a valuable tool to experimentally investigate how stored priors bias perception. Ambiguous sounds are defined as sounds that can be identified as different events and can be readily “pushed” in different perceptual directions depending on the context or cue provided. In two online experiments, human participants were presented with ambiguous sounds in a priming paradigm where each sound was paired with a visual cue that either preceded or succeeded the auditory stimulus. Ambiguous sounds that have multiple interpretations as well as non-ambiguous sounds were paired with either matched or mismatched visual cues. Results revealed that ambiguous sounds were often misidentified when paired with their counterparts' assigned labels, whereas non-ambiguous sounds showed consistent identification across all conditions. This study emphasizes the vital role of contextual cues in perceptual decision-making, especially in ambiguity resolution, and lays a foundation for investigating the neural dynamics of auditory perception.