Research Topic: Auditory Scene Analysis & Predictive Coding
This Research Topic of Frontiers in Neuroscience aims to advance our understanding of the interplay between auditory scene analysis and predictive coding. We seek to bring together theoretical, computational, and empirical approaches that clarify how predictions shape perceptual organization of sounds and reveal the underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms.
Auditory neuroscience is increasingly focused on understanding how the brain organizes complex acoustic environments into meaningful perceptual objects—a process known as auditory scene analysis. This field investigates how listeners distinguish and track multiple sound sources, such as voices or instruments, in situations where sensory input is ambiguous or rapidly changing. Prominent theories now suggest that predictive coding—a hierarchical computational principle where the brain constantly generates and updates predictions about sensory inputs—plays a critical role in explaining the neural mechanisms underlying auditory scene analysis. However, important questions remain about how predictive coding interacts with the dynamic processes that enable auditory object formation and segregation.
Recent research has provided compelling evidence linking predictive coding to different stages of auditory scene analysis. Neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies indicate that prediction errors and top-down modulation contribute significantly to the parsing of auditory input, from detecting unexpected sounds to stream segregation in complex acoustic scenes. Computational models increasingly address how these predictions may guide attentional resources or enhance perceptual stability in noisy contexts. Yet, the field continues to debate the extent to which predictive coding accounts for the full range of auditory scene analysis phenomena, and more research is needed to clarify their interaction across development, attention, and pathology.
Guest Editors are Hirohito Kondo, and I-Fan Lin, and Shigeto Furukawa.
Submission Deadline: 13 June, 2026
Collection: Time Perception in Typical and Atypical Populations
This Collection of Scientific Reports welcomes original research articles on time perception in typical and atypical populations. Time perception, the perceived temporal order of events, is subjective and malleable. It can be affected by several factors, including sensory information, and our emotional and attentional states. Understanding the factors that influence time perception, as well as the nature of its malleability, in neurotypical individuals is critical for understanding certain neurological and psychiatric conditions, whereby the passage of time is altered in affected individuals.
Guest Editors are Elena Gheorghiu, Hirohito Kondo, and Xiangbin Teng.
Submission Deadline: 31 July, 2026
Special Issue: Sensing and Feeling
Emotional experiences are partly driven by the way we combine information from the different senses. In other words, our perceptual and emotional systems interact to give rise to subjective feelings. The Theme Issue 'Sensing and feeling: an integrative approach to sensory processing and emotional experience' of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B describes the influence of visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and interoceptive (bodily) sensations on the experience of emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant. The work showcased in this issue have implications for the emotional well-being of society at large and of special clinical populations, for example people with mood disorders, aversions to specific foods or sounds and hearing loss.
This issue was edited by Hirohito Kondo, Brian Moore and Giulia Poerio, and published in July 2024.
Front image: Firefly-watching is an early summer tradition in Japan. In the darkness, spectators have a calming and enchanting experience witnessing the luminous insects dancing near a clear stream. Credit: iStock.
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Collection: Visual Attention
This Collection of Scientific Reports focuses on cognitive and neural processes underlying visual attention and its associated disorders. Our visual environment typically contains more information that can be effectively processed by our visual system at any one time. Visual attention refers to the cognitive processes that allow us to select the information that is most relevant to ongoing behaviour and filter out distracting information. Visual attention, or lack thereof, has a major impact on all everyday tasks where actions critically depend on perceived visual information from the environment (e.g., crossing the road, driving, and reading). The Collection welcomes original research articles from the areas of Psychology and Neuroscience.
Guest Editors are Geoffrey Ghose, Hirohito Kondo, and Chiara Della Libera.
Submission Deadline: 20 December, 2024 (Closed)
Lecure in October 2022
Speaker: Dr. Jean-Michel Hupé (University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and CNRS)
Title: Psychology at the age of the Anthropocene. Why the knowledge of ecological disasters does not lead to action?
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Lecures in July 2022
Speaker: Dr. Hiroki Terashima (NTT Communication Science Laboratories)
Title: Understanding Sustained Attention of Audition in Comparison with Vision
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Speaker: Dr. Hao Tam Ho (École normale supérieure and Chukyo Universtiy)
Title: Decision Bias and Alpha Oscillation
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Collection: Time Perception
This Collection of Scientific Reports focuses on the malleability and fluidity of human time perception. Specifically, why the perceived temporal order of events, as well as their duration, can be easily affected and distorted by various factors, including emotional states, feelings of control, or perceived causality. This Collection welcomes research providing insight into this malleability, as well as that which explores individual differences in time perception, in both the neurotypical population, as well as individuals with psychiatric disorders, in which imprecise or atypical patterns of temporal processing might be a feature of the disorder or an underlying reason for other symptoms.
Guest Editors are Elena Gheorghiu, Hirohito Kondo, and Ana Pinheiro.
Submission Deadline: 31 December 2022 (Closed)
Lecture in May 2021
Speaker: Dr. Ken Kihara (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology)
Title: Psychology and Autonomous Driving
Lecture in Oct 2020
Speaker: Prof. Hideyuki Ando (Osaka University of Arts and Osaka University)
Title: Media Art and Psychology
TV Appearance in Sep 2020
Lab members, Hirohito Kondo, Kanae Tada, and Ryuju Hasegawa, were interviewed for the BS Fuji TV program "GALILEO X".
The title of the program is "What is Sound to Us ?"
We demonstrated the preliminary results of our study on autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) and misophonia.
Dr. Manabu Honda and
Dr. Masahiro Kumeta
also appeared. The trailer is below.
Behind the Scene
Lectures in Dec 2019 and Jan 2020
Speaker: Dr. I-Fan Lin (Taipei Medical Universtiy and Shuang Ho Hospital)
Title: Psychological Research on People with Autism
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Speaker: Dr. Takahiro Ezaki (JST and The Universtiy of Tokyo)
Title: Energy Landscape Analysis of Neuroimaging Data
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Special Issue: Auditory and Visual Scene Analysis
The Special Issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Socciety B covers advances on scene-analysis research with a combination of psychophysics, neuroimaging, neurophysiology, and computational modeling and presents new directions in empirical and theoretical approaches. For an integrative understanding of scene analysis beyond sensory modalities, we have collected contributing articles from 20 Principal Investigators (research topics). The collection of articles compares recent findings in auditory and visual scene analysis.
The issue was edited by Hirohito Kondo,
Jun Kawahara,
Anouk van Loon, and
Brian Moore and
published in February 2017.
| Discipline | Auditory Science | Visual Science |
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| Behavior |
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Scene Analysis of Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto
Joint Seminar 2016
The seminar, entitled "Theoretical and Experimental Approaches Towards Auditory Scene Analysis", was held at the Château de Bourron-Marlotte Fontainebleau in France. The closed meeting was organized by Daniel Pressniter (CNRS) and Hirohito Kondo (NTT) in June 2016 and supported by JSPS Bilateral Programs. More than twenty researchers, including postdocs and PhD students, participated in this seminar to build an integrated theory of auditory scene analysis from findings of different disciplines. Each participant gave a 30-min presentation on his/her research theme. The presentations covered a wide range of topics including psychophysical, neuroimaging, neurophysiological, and mathematical modeling studies. The lectures contained unpublished data, which led to a lively question and answer session. The participants spent all three days in a suburban facility outside the bustle of Paris, which fostered in-depth discussion outside of the scheduled program. We will continue to actively support young researchers and promote information exchange for collaborative research.
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