Better discrimination of small changes in commonly encountered than in less commonly encountered auditory stimuli.

Abstract

Results from 3 auditory tasks revealed that small changes made in stimuli commonly encountered in everyday life are more easily discriminated than are the same changes made in stimuli not as commonly encountered. The tasks required discrimination of a frequency difference in 1 tone of 6-tone chords or nonchords, discrimination of a duration difference in 1 note of common tunes or nontunes, and discrimination of the deletion of a band of frequencies from speech sounds played forward or backward. Different crews of college-aged listeners served in the different tasks. If future research shows this difference in discriminability to be a general property of commonly encountered stimuli--attributable to a difference in the way they are processed in the nervous system--then discrimination tests of this sort could become useful for assessing whether stimuli have made the transition from one form of processing to the other.

Auditory change detection with common and uncommon sounds

“…We hypothesized that when scene size increases the rate of change detection will decrease, similar to the results of Gregg and Samuel (2008). We also hypothesized that participants will have more difficulty detecting a change with uncommon sounds vs. common sounds, like McFadden and Callaway's (1999) ranged from 18 years to 25 years (M = 20.5 years, SD = 1.5 years). A hearing test (Digital Recordings, 2010) was used to determine that all participants had normal hearing.…”

“…When hearing the same voice, all listeners were able to accurately say they did not detect a change in the voice, but when the voice changed, 42% of listeners were not able to accurately say they detected a change. McFadden and Callaway (1999) tested participants to see if they could notice a change when listening to common sounds vs. commons sounds, such as in chords vs. nonchords, tunes vs. nontunes, and forward vs. backward played speech. Participants were significantly better at detecting changes with common vs. uncommon stimuli.…”

Auditory signals for enhanced operator performance with hand-held mine detectors

“…Further, as technology and algorithm development advance it would be desirable to have a family of icons that convey information as to the content, size, and type of buried object that is detected. As with any new system this would require some amount of initial signal familiarization and auditory training for the system operators (Letowski, 1996;McFadden and Callaway, 1999). However, with easy to memorize and intuitive audio icons the amount of training should be minimal (Letowski, 1996).…”

Absolute Judgment of Musical Interval Width

“…A musical prototype can assimilate an area of approximately 25 cents in either direction (Vurma & Ross, 2006), i.e., musically trained listeners may perceive all stimuli within 25 cents of a prototype to be identical (Perlman & Krumhansl, 1996;Siegel & Siegel, 1977a). Alternatively, a prototype may show enhanced discrimination in its immediate vicinity compared to the same area surrounding a non-prototype (Acker, Pastore, & Hall, 1995;McFadden & Callaway, 1999). Neither of these effects must necessarily occur, even among trained listeners (Schellenberg, 2002); however, it may be that with increasing musical experience, a prototype gradually changes from magnet to anchor, as detecting fine mistunings becomes more important to professional performance (Barrett, 1999).…”

“…Harmonic intervals were also rejected because harmonic intervals can draw attention away from tonal relationships (Zatorre & Halpern, 1979), and because harmonic intervals create beating-an audible phenomenon that occurs when harmonic tones interact. When beats are present, they can make discrimination difficult for sensitive listeners (Vos, 1982) and overpower fine differences (McFadden & Callaway, 1999); alternatively, some listeners can use beats instead of width to judge interval identity (Hall & Hess, 1984). Ascending intervals were therefore selected as the most likely to promote comparison of musical interval sounds.…”