Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Everyday hearing requires inferring the causal factors that produce a sound, as when we separate the acoustic effectsof the environment (reverberation) from those of sound sources. Here we consider perceptual inferences from impactsounds, in which the resonance of a struck object provides cues to its material, but via acoustic effects that might benontrivial to disentangle from reverberation. We investigated whether and how humans separate the effects of objectresonance and reverberation in a material classification task. For comparison, we implemented a Bayesian observer thatinferred material from a generative model of object sounds without reverberation. Humans were robust to reverberation,whereas the model was not. However, human robustness was specific to reverberation consistent with the statistics ofnatural environments. The results suggest that humans use internal models of room and object acoustics to determine theirrespective contributions to sound, providing an example of causal inference in audition.