Perception of Complex Auditory Patterns
Abstract
This report describes the results of research in four areas: 1) the perception of complex sounds, including tonal sequences, multidimensional complex sounds, and Gaussian noise; 2) information integration; 3) multi-stage decision making; 4) studies of the relation between auditory abilities measured with speech and nonspeech stimuli. Major accomplishments during this funding period include: a) the discovery of the proportion-of-the-total-duration (PTD) principle: Each individual component of a complex sound is resolved with an accuracy that is a function of its proportion of the total duration of the sound; b) even small degrees of logarithmic frequency transposition of tonal patterns severely degrades the detectability of pattern changes in novel sequences, but not in familiar sequences; c) temporal integration of auditory information is limited by two distinct types of internal noise, one that is added at the periphery before a decision statistic is formed, and 'central', or post-decision, noise; d) the development of a theory that incorporates these limiting factors; e) the completion and publication of studies of categorical perception for speech and non-speech sounds, demonstrating that enhanced discrimination performance in the region of certain categorical boundaries does not reflect either 'hard-wired' feature detectors in the auditory nervous system, nor psychoacoustic boundaries determined by acoustic peculiarities of complex waveforms.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 1989
- Accession Number
- ADA219626
Entities
People
- Charles S. Watson
- Gary R. Kidd
Organizations
- Indiana University Bloomington