Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To explain how perception processes are performed, understanding how continuous sensory streams are temporally segmented into discrete units is central. This is particularly the case in speech perception where temporal segmentation is key for identifying linguistic units contained between consecutive events in time. We propose an original probabilistic construct, that we call "Bayesian gates", to segment temporally continuous streams of sensory stimuli into sequences of decoders. We first define Bayesian gates mathematically and describe their properties. We then illustrate their behavior in the context of a model of word recognition in speech perception. We show that, based on an event detection module, they sequentially parse the acoustic stimulus, so that each syllable decoder only processes a segment of the sensory signal.