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P Zahorik

Publications and source records attributed to P Zahorik.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Loudness constancy with varying sound source distance.

At a listener's ears, sound source power and sound source distance are confounded in measures of acoustic intensity, a physical property long thought to be the primary determinate of loudness. Although the relationship between sound source loudness and power is well known when source distance is fixed, relatively little is known about source loudness under conditions of varying distance. Here we show a robust loudness constancy, similar in many ways to visual size constancy, that results under distance-varying conditions that produce inaccurate estimates of source distance. Our results suggest that the auditory system does not require accurate distance estimates to judge source loudness, even when distance is variable. We offer an alternative explanation of loudness constancy based solely on a reverberant sound energy cue.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2001

Estimating sound source distance with and without vision.

BACKGROUND: Visual capture is an important perceptual phenomenon in which the spatial location of a visual target influences the perceived location of a related auditory target. Little is known about visual capture in a distance dimension. METHODS: Two groups of listeners judged the apparent distances of five loudspeaker sound sources, extending from 1 to 5 m. In one group, each listener was allowed to view the loudspeaker array. In the second group, listeners were blindfolded for the duration of the experiment. RESULTS: No visual capture effects were observed. Instead, the addition of vision was found to both improve distance judgment accuracy and lower judgment variability compared with the auditory-only stimulus. Auditory-only accuracy was found to substantially improve over the course of the experiment, however. CONCLUSIONS: Visual capture in distance is perhaps less general than suggested by past research, a result that has important implications for the display of spatial layout under conditions where vision is either missing or degraded.

Adolescent↗