Humans parsimoniously represent auditory sequences by pruning and completing the underlying network structure
- CNRS ERL 9003, INSERM U992, France
Abstract
Successive auditory inputs are rarely independent, their relationships ranging from local transitions between elements to hierarchical and nested representations. In many situations, humans retrieve these dependencies even from limited datasets. However, this learning at multiple scale levels is poorly understood. Here we used the formalism proposed by network science to study the representation of local and higher-order structures and their interaction in auditory sequences. We show that human adults exhibited biases in their perception of local transitions between elements, which made them sensitive to high-order network structures such as communities. This behavior is consistent with the creation of a parsimonious simplified model from the evidence they receive, achieved by pruning and completing relationships between network elements. This observation suggests that the brain does not rely on exact memories but on a parsimonious representation of the world. Moreover, this bias can be analytically modeled by a memory/efficiency trade-off. This model correctly accounts for previous findings, including local transition probabilities as well as high-order network structures, unifying sequence learning across scales. We finally propose putative brain implementations of such bias.
Data availability
All Data and analysis are publicly available at https://osf.io/e8u7f/
Article and author information
Author details
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
Funding
European Research Council (695710)
- Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Floris P de Lange, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Netherlands
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants gave their informed consents for participation and publication and this research was approved by the Ethical research committee of Paris-Saclay University under the reference CER-Paris-Saclay-2019-063
Version history
- Preprint posted: May 19, 2022 (view preprint)
- Received: January 25, 2023
- Accepted: April 28, 2023
- Accepted Manuscript published: May 2, 2023 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: June 5, 2023 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2023, Benjamin et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Humans parsimoniously represent auditory sequences by pruning and completing the underlying network structure
eLife 12:e86430.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.86430
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