The Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Society: An Overview
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Each year, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society holds an annual meeting in the spring. The purpose of the meeting is to bring together researchers from around the world to share the latest studies in cognitive neuroscience. The Cognitive Neuroscience Society works diligently to schedule the annual meeting in a way that minimizes conflicts with other conferences, religious observances, and major political or social events. However, due to the numerous factors involved in planning, it is not always possible to avoid all potential conflicts.
The society's work extends to understanding how our brains process the sounds around us, from the simplest noises to the most complex musical arrangements. One researcher, Zofia Hołubowska of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, has delved into the intricacies of sound perception.
Auditory Pathway
Understanding Sound Processing
“This hierarchy of music perception is quite neat, but not exactly true,” says Zofia Hołubowska of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. In a new study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience led by Hołubowska, cognitive neuroscientists wanted to better understand that interconnectivity, specifically looking at how changing the location of sounds affected people’s perceptions of musical phrases.
Participants in the study listened to excerpts of Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions, while at random points in time, the location of the speaker playing the sound was changing. They found that the musical structure affected how people perceived changes in the location of the sounds. “Depending on musical context, or more specifically, if the change happened somewhere within a phrase - a small coherent melody within a piece of music - or at the boundary between two phrases, we found differing perceptions of an identical change in the sound source location,” Holubowska explains.
Holubowska: I always like to think of sound processing as a very creative process. When you start thinking about the different sounds you can hear in your surroundings, you can probably identify multiple sources: the clock ticking, birds singing outside the window and maybe a washing machine in the next room. However, this is not how your brain receives this information. What reaches your ears is a single, complex sound wave containing all the information. Your brain disentangles this big mixture, deciding what you hear and where the sound comes from.
Holubowska: I think it is important to know that the brain doesn’t work in a simple, linear way, meaning that one thing is processed after another, without interference. Rather, our perception is full of forward and feedback loops, when one process can change how the same thing is being perceived differently. Our results shed also some light on how the auditory pathway is constructed.
Holubowska: Our findings help us understand the dynamics of information processing along the auditory pathway on different levels of complexity: from simple acoustic information to meanings, expectations, and emotions. Hopefully, with some follow-up studies, we will be able to better describe the neural mechanism, to tell more about what happens where.
The society will host the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) 2026 Annual Meeting, March 7 - 10, 2026 in Vancouver, BC, Canada! We will have a full schedule of events slated for this year's meeting that will include Invited Symposia, Symposia, Several Poster Sessions, a Keynote Address as well as our Annual George A.
The Complexity of Auditory Research
When exploring the perception of sound, we quite often use very simple sounds, such as artificially created noise or very simple sound waves. However, that’s not what people listen to most of their lives. Rather, we are constantly surrounded by very complex sounds: our environment, people talking, playing music. In research, we should take this complexity into account.
At the same time, we are facing methodological concerns. When adding complexity to the sounds we are using the studies, we also scale-up the number of potential reasons why we observe certain effects. For that we have to control for all the potential answers. Is our effect because of some acoustic parameters? Or was it because the participant has a particular emotional connection to music that they were presented with?
Music, in particular, allows for experimental control while still capturing this richness. You can manipulate precise acoustic features while also introducing high-level structure, emotional content, or context.
Personal Connection to Auditory Neuroscience
On a personal level, the story is the reverse: I started studying music when I was six, and I’ve always loved it. I play and sing until this day, but more as a hobby than anything else. At the same time, I was drawn to science - first chemistry, which moved to neuroscience. Pursuing research in the field of auditory neuroscience and music perception lets me bring together my two main interests: music and science.
Future Directions
Holubowska: I am quite excited about the upcoming possibilities stemming from these initial results. This was a proof of concept, that you can manipulate the perception of very simple acoustic qualities with musical context.
Holubowska: I think what I am quite proud of, is that together with my supervisor, Prof. Marc Schönwiesner, we worked out a pretty clever paradigm for this experiment. The general problem in the studies is that when you introduce a manipulation in one place, you have to be careful not to change the perception of something else. In our case, we wanted to make some changes in the acoustics, while not disrupting music, which sounds like a challenging task - music is based on acoustics after all. The clever idea was to play with the spatial location of the sound. When the loudspeaker playing sound changes slightly, it doesn’t really interfere with the musical content. At the same time, it is a noticeable acoustic change.