Acoustic, ecological, perceptual and cognitive factors that are common in the identification of 41 brief, varied sounds were evaluated. In Experiment 1, identification time and accuracy, causal uncertainty values, and spectral and temporal properties of the sounds were obtained. Experiment 2 was a survey to obtain ecological frequency counts. Experiment 3 solicited perceptual-cognitive ratings. Factor analyses of spectral parameters and perceptual-cognitive ratings were performed. Identification time and causal uncertainty are highly interrelated, and both are related to ecological frequency and the presence of harmonics and similar spectral bursts. Experiments 4 and 5 used a priming paradigm to verify correlational relationships between identification time and causal uncertainty and to assess the effect of sound typicality. Results support a hybrid approach for theories of everyday sound identification.
Comparisons are made between the perception of environmental sound and the perception of speech. With both, two types of processing are involved, bottom-up and top-down, and with both, the detailed form of the processing is, in several respects, similar. Recognition of isolated speech and environmental sounds produces similar patterns of semantic interpretations. Environmental sound "homonyms" are ambiguous in much the same manner as speech homonyms. Environmental sounds become integrated on the basis of cognitive processes similar to those used to perceive speech. The general conclusion is that environmental sound is usefully thought of as a form of language.
Increasing use of automation in computer systems, such as advanced cockpits, presents special challenges in the design of user interfaces.The challenge is particularly difficult when automation is intermittent because the interface must support smooth transitions from automated to manual mode. A theory of direct manipulation predicts that this interface style will smooth the transition.Interfaces were designed to test the prediction and to evaluate two aspects of direet manipulation, semantic distance and engagement. Empirical results supported the theoretical prediction and also showed that direet engagement can have some adverse effeets on another concurrent manual task. Generalizations of our results to other complex systems are presented.
Three experiments were conducted to investigate the role of both syntactic (i.e., temporal structure) and semantic (i.e.,knowledge of the source events) factors in a two-alternative (target/ nontarget) categorization task involving patterns of nonspeech acoustic transients. The results demonstrated that both factors can play an important role in the classification of such patterns. Although pattern syntax influenced performance in all three experiments, the effects of syntactic structure were clearest in Experiment I, in which listeners categorized meaningless tonal patterns. Listeners who categorized a syntactically structured target set performed better than did those with an unstructured set. Experiments 2 and 3 were similar to Experiment 1, but listeners classified patterns of familiar, brief-duration, complex sounds rather than tones. When listeners in Experiment 3 were given explicit descriptive information about the pattern components in their instructions, performance actually improved for interpretable, but not for uninterpretable, patterns. This suggests that syntactic and semantic factors interact in an important way to influence performance. It was argued that many complex nonspeech patterns have both syntactic and semantic structure, which is determined by the sequence of source events that produce them. In classifying such patterns, as in the case of speech, listeners rely on their knowledge of these factors as well as on the perceptual information in the sound itself.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.