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At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

Auditory perception of spatiotemporal patterns.

To test the tendency of subjects to perceptually organize discrete temporal patterns with regard to runs of identical stimulus events, spatiotemporal patterns of white noise were presented for reproduction. The subjects in Experiment I began their reproductions with the true starting points of the patterns, but the subjects in Experiment II, who could not perceive the true starting points, began their reproductions with either long or short runs. It is suggested that changes in runs of auditory patterns are perceptually analogous to changes in contours of visual patterns.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Note on auditory perception of physiognomic properties in short melodic structures.

The present study shows that short melodies composed to conform with the Gestalt features of line-schematizations which had been drawn to be expressive of certain emotions and concepts were, in turn, judged by both 28 blind boys and girls and 87 college students sighted subjects, according to prediction. The results are interpreted as supporting the underlying hypothesis that physiognomic properties are "similar" across modalities.

Adolescent↗

From auditory image to auditory percept: facilitation through common processes?

Two experiments explored implicit memory for auditory stimuli as measured by a test of perceptual identification. The facilitative effect of perceived auditory primes was contrasted with that of imaged auditory primes. In Experiment 1, there was a significant priming effect from imaged spoken-word primes that did not differ significantly from the level of priming due to perceived spoken-word primes, measured by a test of auditory perceptual identification. There was no facilitation of spoken-word identification following creation of an image of a word's referent sound. In Experiment 2, identification of an environmental sound was facilitated by prior processing of an imaged sound from the same category, though there was significantly more transfer following processing of the actual sound.

Humans↗

Auditory perception of conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations in birds: evidence for special processes.

Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus), canaries (Serinus canaria), and zebra finches (Poephila guttata castanotis) were tested for their ability to discriminate among distance calls of each species. For comparison, starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were tested on the same sounds. Response latencies to detect a change in a repeating background of sound were taken as a measure of the perceptual similarity among calls. All 4 species showed clear evidence of 3 perceptual categories corresponding to the calls of the 3 species. Also, budgerigars, canaries, and zebra finches showed an enhanced ability to discriminate among calls of their own species over the calls of the others. Starlings discriminated more efficiently among canary calls than among budgerigar or zebra finch calls. The results show species differences in discrimination of species-specific acoustic communication signals and provide insight into the nature of specialized perceptual processes.

Animal Communication↗

Acoustic features and auditory perceptions of the cries of newborns with prenatal and perinatal complications.

This article describes 2 experiments which examine the relation between neonatal cry features and obstetric histories. Experiment 1 shows that 24 clinically healthy, normal newborns who may be at risk due to a high number of prenatal and perinatal complications can be distinguished from 24 low-complications infants by harmonic and durational features of the cry. High-complications infants required more stimulation to elicit the cry, had a longer latency to cry onset, a shorter first cry expiration, a higher cry pitch, and cried less in total time than low-complications infants. In experiment 2, naive adults rated the high-complications infant cries as more aversive, grating sick, urgent, distressing, piercing, discomforting, and arousing than low-complications infant crues. Factor analyses showed that although the low-complications infant cries were described along one dimension of discomfort, a second factor emerged conveying the "sick" nature of the sound of the cry of the high-complications infants. It was suggested that certain cry features may reflect the risk status of the infant.

Adult↗

[Auditory perception and fetal reaction to react to sound stimulation (author's transl)].

The confirmation of techniques used to stimulate the fetus in utero led us to an exhaustive study of spontaneous intra-uterine noises and those modified by different stimuli (while evaluating the diagnosis of fetal distress with flat cardiac rhythm during pregnancy). By the use of elaborate techniques simultaneously we could appreciate the signal and analyse the information obtained and we able to show incontrovertibly that over and above the basal sound that the fetus could hear it could appreciate the mother's voice and other voices, which were perfectly audible to it but lacking in tone because the sharp frequencies were absorbed. The first results of stimulation using calibrated sounds seem to confirm that the fetus does not react to a sound stimulus when it is in a state of fetal distress, but when there is no fetal distress it does react immediately by change in the heart rate, often associated with movements. This technique, incidentally, can be used to show if the fetus can hear well in the uterus in cases of family deafness or of rubella associated with pregnancy.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Changes in auditory perception in the menstrual cycle.

In a attempt to specify the critical functional components involved in the menstrual fluctuation of the upper frequency limit of the binaural beat we have obtained evidence of better performance in a variety of tasks at period and mid-cycle than at other times. These tasks include detection of physical beating, low-frequency octave matching, and lateralisation of clicks having interaural time delays in the 100 musec region. Continuous pure-tone frequency discrimination did not show a significant cyclical pattern overall but there was a tendency for low-frequency discrimination to show the described pattern. An attempt is made to reconcile some of these results with those of Wynn (1973) on absolute pitch, in terms of possible physiological and biochemical correlates. Three conclusions can be drawn: (1) The representations both of low-frequency tones and of the interaural time differences involved in some localisation tasks are particularly susceptible to alteration by the biochemical changes of the menstrual cycle: (2) The changes underlying perceptual variations are multiple, and inevitably confounded in any single task. (3) The distinction between the sensitivity and bias parameters of performance appears to be valuable in specifying menstrual effects. Several further lines of enquiry are suggested, but methodological difficulties in cycle research make it likely that more progress will come from better understanding of the physiological bases of psychoacoustic tasks using other methods, rather than from investigating natural menstrual effects.

Adult↗

The effects of early middle ear pathology on auditory perception and academic achievement.

Two groups of children were compared to determine the effects of early middle ear pathology on the development of auditory perceptual skills and academic achievement. The conductive loss (CL) group consisted of 15 children, aged seven to nine years, with histories of middle ear pathology. The normal control (NC) group was matched for age, sex, and socioeconomic status and had negative histories of middle ear pathology. Both groups were from a suburban community of primarily mild socioeconomic status. A test battery consisting of 12 auditory perceptual tests as well as measures of academic achievement, non-verbal intelligence and visual perception was administered. Results showed that the overall performance of the CL group on the test battery was significantly lower than that of the NC group. Performance of the CL group was also significantly lower in specific auditory perceptual areas. No significant differences were found on test of non-verbal intelligence or visual perception. Although scores were not significantly different on academic achievement tests, school records indicate that the CL loss group had received more special support services than the controls. This investigation suggests that early middle ear pathology may produce secondary effects that can persist well beyond the episodes of temporary conductive hearing loss.

Achievement↗

Auditory perception and speech evolution.

Human speech perception seems to involve the ability to recognize groupings of speech sounds rather than component phonemes, and to distinguish between permuted orders of items within sequences as holistic entities. Humans can use this Holistic Pattern Recognition (HPR) not only with speech and music, but also with sequences of arbitrarily selected sounds after very little practice. Infrahuman primates, cats, chinchillas, and birds also seem to employ HPR with auditory sequences. Further, there is recent evidence that animals unable to produce speech sounds can nevertheless discriminate between closely related phonemes. Thus, it appears that human speech perception employs prelinguistic abilities shared with other animals to distinguish between phonemic groupings. Of course, use of speech for communication also requires establishment of phonemic groupings as symbols, and sequential arrangement of these symbols, by rule, to convey the desired message. Identification of Components and their Order (ICO) for auditory sequences is limited to humans. ICO involves verbal categorization and storage of the names for successive auditory items as they appear, followed by retrieval or the names in the order stored. Thus, direct identification of the order of sounds within auditory sequences rests upon verbal ability, which provides an explanation for the difficulty that aphasics have in identifying order within nonverbal sequences. Much confusion in the literature on auditory sequence perception seems to have resulted from a failure to differentiate between HPR and ICO.

Animals↗

Cortical computational maps control auditory perception.

Mustached bats orient and find insects by emitting ultrasonic pulses and analyzing the returning echoes. Neurons in the Doppler-shifted constant-frequency (DSCF) and frequency-modulated (FM-FM) areas of the auditory cortex form maps of echo frequency (target velocity) and echo delay (target range), respectively. Bats were trained to discriminate changes in echo frequency or delay, and then these areas were selectively inactivated with muscimol. Inactivation of the DSCF area disrupted frequency but not delay discriminations; inactivation of the FM-FM area disrupted delay but not frequency discriminations. Thus, focal inactivation of specific cortical maps produces specific disruptions in the perception of biosonar signals.

Animals↗

[The auditory perception of frequency-localized acoustic on-events].

The quick changing of amplitude envelope (amplitude modulation) is the inherent properties of speech signals. They are analyzed by the auditory system and are reflected in the auditory sensation as a sequences of some "events", that participate in creating of phonetic images. The dynamics of frequency distribution of events is considered to be used by listeners as a determinants of some consonants. However, this supposition are inconsistent with the psychoacoustics experiments showed that listeners can't determine the frequency of amplitude irregularities of tonal components. Current work consists of the discussion of this problem and results of experiments where the perception of an amplitude jumps in different frequency format area was studied using the synthetic quasi--syllable. The results obtained give evidence that the phoneme interpretations "know" the frequency of amplitude irregularieties.

Auditory Perception↗

Chimaeric sounds reveal dichotomies in auditory perception.

By Fourier's theorem, signals can be decomposed into a sum of sinusoids of different frequencies. This is especially relevant for hearing, because the inner ear performs a form of mechanical Fourier transform by mapping frequencies along the length of the cochlear partition. An alternative signal decomposition, originated by Hilbert, is to factor a signal into the product of a slowly varying envelope and a rapidly varying fine time structure. Neurons in the auditory brainstem sensitive to these features have been found in mammalian physiological studies. To investigate the relative perceptual importance of envelope and fine structure, we synthesized stimuli that we call 'auditory chimaeras', which have the envelope of one sound and the fine structure of another. Here we show that the envelope is most important for speech reception, and the fine structure is most important for pitch perception and sound localization. When the two features are in conflict, the sound of speech is heard at a location determined by the fine structure, but the words are identified according to the envelope. This finding reveals a possible acoustic basis for the hypothesized 'what' and 'where' pathways in the auditory cortex.

Auditory Perception↗