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How passive is passive listening? Toward a sensorimotor theory of auditory perception

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Abstract

According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on psychologically elucidating sensorimotor laws, but the theory’s ramifications for neuroscience still remain underexamined. Here we sketch the beginnings of a research program that could address these two outstanding challenges in terms of auditory perception. We review the neuroscience literature on passive listening, which is defined as listening without overt bodily movement, and conclude that sensorimotor theory provides a unique perspective on the consistent finding of motor system activation. In contrast to competing theories, this activation is predicted to be involved not only in the perception of speech- and action-related sounds, but in auditory perception in general. More specifically, we propose that the auditory processing associated with supplementary motor areas forms part of the neural basis of the exercise of sensorimotor know-how: these areas’ recognized role in (1) facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound and (2) supporting flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to guide auditory experience and enable auditory imagery, can be understood in terms of two key characteristics of sensorimotor interaction, its (1) “alerting capacity” (or “grabbiness”) and (2) “corporality” (or “bodiliness”), respectively. We also highlight that there is more to the inside of the body than the brain: there is an opportunity to develop sensorimotor theory into new directions in terms of the still poorly understood active processes of the peripheral auditory system.

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Notes

  1. In the case of vision this potential access can be interpreted as a saccade followed by fixation on the relevant visual detail. However, this is not the full story as change blindness can also occur when the eye is directly fixating the change at the moment it occurs, suggesting that “you do not always see where we look” (O’Regan et al. 2000: 201). In other words, it is important to keep in mind that accessing detail with the eyes is not sufficient in itself for visual awareness, which additionally requires attention.

  2. In this more general formulation, motor resonance theory has substantial overlap with other important theories in addition to the motor theory of speech perception, such as grounded cognition (Barsalou 2008), common coding theory and ideomotor theory (Hommel et al. 2001), as well as motor imagery (Decety et al. 1994) and emulation theory (Grush 2004).

  3. Note that this passive listening paradigm not only differs from the active listening paradigm, which is based on tasks requiring a motor response, but also from passive listening in the context of auditory selective attention task, in which passive listening is contrasted with “active” or “attentive” listening (Toro et al. 2005).

  4. Note that we are not committed to claiming that these particular areas per se are necessary for the exercise of sensorimotor mastery. What is required are specific kinds of neural activity patterns that emerge in response to sensory stimuli (Luczak et al. 2009), and presumably these complex patterns tend to be more easily realized with the help of these areas because they acquired a particularly suitable neural connectivity.

  5. To be fair, it is possible to model this sensorimotor engagement in counterfactual terms, namely in terms of internal models that predict the sensory consequences of potential movements (Seth 2014). However, this kind of approach sits uneasily with sensorimotor theory’s avoidance of appealing to internal representations (Flament-Fultot 2016; Froese 2014; Silverman 2018).

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Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to Luis Pineda, who provided helpful feedback throughout the whole writing process, and to Masatoshi Yoshida, who provided useful comments on the penultimate draft.

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  1. Institute for Applied Mathematics and Systems Research (IIMAS), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Circuito Escolar (IIMAS-UNAM), Ciudad Universitaria, 04510, Mexico City, Mexico

    Tom Froese & Ximena González-Grandón

  2. Center for the Sciences of Complexity (C3), UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico

    Tom Froese

  3. Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Complexity (IFICC), Santiago, Chile

    Ximena González-Grandón

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Froese, T., González-Grandón, X. How passive is passive listening? Toward a sensorimotor theory of auditory perception. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 619–651 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09641-6

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