Auditory perceptual maps in humans and mice share common structures and predict perceptual decisions in discrimination learning.

Overview

1. Institute of Physiology, Focus Program Translational Neurosciences, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz,Mainz, Germany

Abstract

To efficiently perceive sensory information and guide behavior, the brain organizes incoming sensory stimuli into internal maps that capture perceptual relatedness between stimuli. Whether these maps, typically assessed in scaling paradigms without feedback, also shape perceptual decisions during reinforcement-based conditions remains unclear. Here, we assess task-naïve perceptual maps from similarity judgments of pulsed sound stimuli, and compare them to perceptual maps obtained from multiple discrimination tasks in humans (n = 152) and mice (n = 11). We find that task-naïve maps predict how well humans discriminate sounds, how quickly they learn, and which stimulus features guide their choices. Moreover, naïve and task-based maps share key structures, suggesting a stable perceptual map architecture throughout learning. Remarkably, human task-based and task-naïve perceptual maps share key features and structures with the task-based perceptual maps of mice, indicating congruent structures of auditory perception across species. Together, our results indicate that perception relies on robust internal maps that provide a common framework to flexibly guide behavior in changing environments.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

No file of the authors' code could be read here: it is described below, and read at its source.

Code availability

The MATLAB code used to analyze the data of this study has been deposited at G-Node (www.g-node.org) and is publicly available (10.12751/g-node.bgb999).

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

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Data availability

The data of this study and the pulsed auditory stimuli used in this study have been deposited at G-Node (www.g-node.org) and is publicly available (10.12751/g-node.bgb999).

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

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Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 4 authors, 3 keywords, 2 funders, 86 references.

Cite

This paper

Seiler, J. P.-H., Cazzetta, G., Ghobadi, A., & Rumpel, S. (2026). Auditory perceptual maps in humans and mice share common structures and predict perceptual decisions in discrimination learning. Communications psychology, 4(1), 98. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00485-w

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