Sound identity, salience, and perceived importance in complex auditory environments

Human listeners effortlessly identify salient sounds in their environments, yet the relationship between sound class identity, auditory salience, and perceived importance in complex auditory scenes remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigate these connections with scores derived from subject responses using a scoring mechanism, combined with auditory salience and pupillometry data. By leveraging both psychophysical experiments as well as a large-scale annotated dataset, our findings reveal biased responses and higher importance rankings for specific sound classes, such as alarm sounds and speech, and highlight a consistent perceptual ordering of sounds based on their identity. Salience judgments and pupillary responses further support this distinction, showing that the level of heightened arousal follows the same sound class order. The results underscore the influence of semantic mappings on both bottom-up and top-down sensory processing, suggesting that sound identity plays a crucial role in shaping perceptual judgment and neural responses. Despite dataset limitations, our findings offer insights into auditory scene analysis and provide a novel framework for understanding how auditory perception prioritizes sounds based on both their inherent properties and learned semantic associations.