Individual differences in selective attention predict speech identification at a cocktail party
Listeners with normal hearing show considerable individual differences in speech understanding when competing speakers are present, as in a crowded restaurant. Here, we show that one source of this variance are individual differences in the ability to focus selective attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors. In 50 young normal-hearing listeners, the performance in tasks measuring auditory and visual selective attention was associated with sentence identification in the presence of spatially separated competing speakers. Together, the measures of selective attention explained a similar proportion of variance as the binaural sensitivity for the acoustic temporal fine stru…
Temporal weights in the perception of sound intensity: Effects of sound duration and number of temporal segments
Loudness is a fundamental aspect of auditory perception that is closely related to the physical level of the sound. However, it has been demonstrated that, in contrast to a sound level meter, human listeners do not weight all temporal segments of a sound equally. Instead, the beginning of a sound is more important for loudness estimation than later temporal portions. The present study investigates the mechanism underlying this primacy effect by varying the number of equal-duration temporal segments (5 and 20) and the total duration of the sound (1.0 to 10.0 s) in a factorial design. Pronounced primacy effects were observed for all 20-segment sounds. The temporal weights for the five-segment…
Jonauskaite_Tables_S1-S14_rev – Supplemental material for Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity
Supplemental material, Jonauskaite_Tables_S1-S14_rev for Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity by Domicele Jonauskaite, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Nele Dael, Daniel Oberfeld, Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, Abdulrahman S. Al-Rasheed, Jean-Philippe Antonietti, Victoria Bogushevskaya, Amer Chamseddine, Eka Chkonia, Violeta Corona, Eduardo Fonseca-Pedrero, Yulia A. Griber, Gina Grimshaw, Aya Ahmed Hasan, Jelena Havelka, Marco Hirnstein, Bodil S. A. Karlsson, Eric Laurent, Marjaana Lindeman, Lynn Marquardt, Philip Mefoh, Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, Alicia Pérez-Albéniz, Niloufar Pouyan, Maya Roinishvili, Lyudmyla Romanyuk, Alejandro Salgado Montej…
Jonauskaite_OpenPracticesDisclosure_rev – Supplemental material for Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity
Supplemental material, Jonauskaite_OpenPracticesDisclosure_rev for Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity by Domicele Jonauskaite, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Nele Dael, Daniel Oberfeld, Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, Abdulrahman S. Al-Rasheed, Jean-Philippe Antonietti, Victoria Bogushevskaya, Amer Chamseddine, Eka Chkonia, Violeta Corona, Eduardo Fonseca-Pedrero, Yulia A. Griber, Gina Grimshaw, Aya Ahmed Hasan, Jelena Havelka, Marco Hirnstein, Bodil S. A. Karlsson, Eric Laurent, Marjaana Lindeman, Lynn Marquardt, Philip Mefoh, Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, Alicia Pérez-Albéniz, Niloufar Pouyan, Maya Roinishvili, Lyudmyla Romanyuk, Alejandro Salg…
Temporal weights in loudness: Investigation of the effects of background noise and sound level
Previous research has consistently shown that for sounds varying in intensity over time, the beginning of the sound is of higher importance for the perception of loudness than later parts (primacy effect). However, in all previous studies, the target sounds were presented in quiet, and at a fixed average sound level. In the present study, temporal loudness weights for a time-varying narrowband noise were investigated in the presence of a continuous bandpass-filtered background noise and the average sound levels of the target stimuli were varied across a range of 60 dB. Pronounced primacy effects were observed in all conditions and there were no significant differences between the temporal w…
Visual and postural eye-height information is flexibly coupled in the perception of virtual environments.
We conducted two experiments to investigate how observers integrate postural and visual eye-height information when estimating the layout of interior space. In Experiment 1, we varied postural and visual eye-height information independently of each other in a virtual-reality setup. Observers estimated the width, depth, and height of simulated rooms. All dimensions were perceived as larger when the virtual visual eye-height corresponded to sitting on the floor as compared with standing upright. In contrast, the estimates remained widely unaffected by the observer's physical posture (likewise sitting vs. standing). In Experiment 2, we studied effects of the viewing condition (real vs. virtual…
Temporal loudness weights in background noise: Data and models
Previous studies consistently showed that human listeners primarily consider the beginning of a time-varying sound when judging its overall loudness, and place less weight on subsequent temporal portions. However, all experiments studying this primacy effect in temporal loudness weights presented the target sound in quiet. Here, we compared temporal weights when the target sound was either presented in quiet or in a continuous background noise, and for a variation in the level of the target sound across a range of 60 dB. The target sound was a time-varying narrowband noise, the background noise was a continuous bandpass-filtered noise. In all conditions, we observed the expected primacy eff…
SupplementaryMaterial_CeilingColor_finalSubmission – Supplemental material for Which Attribute of Ceiling Color Influences Perceived Room Height?
Supplemental material, SupplementaryMaterial_CeilingColor_finalSubmission for Which Attribute of Ceiling Color Influences Perceived Room Height? by Christoph von Castell, Heiko Hecht and Daniel Oberfeld in Human Factors: The Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
Visual discrimination of arrival times: Troublesome effects of stimuli and experimental regime
Data-Driven approach reveals universal patterns in colour-emotion associations across 30 nations
Electrophysiological Correlates of Intensity Resolution Under Forward Masking
Nonsimultaneous masking can severely impair auditory intensity resolution, but the effect strongly depends on the stimulus configuration. For example, an intense forward masker causes a pronounced impairment in intensity resolution for standards presented at intermediate levels, but not for standards presented at low and high levels, resulting in a midlevel hump pattern (Zeng et al., Hear Res 55:223-230, 1991). Several aspects of the phenomenon cannot be explained by mechanisms in the auditory periphery. For instance, backward maskers cause midlevel humps at least as large as the humps caused by forward maskers. The present experiment was aimed at studying the relation between the effects o…
The effect of silent gaps on temporal weights in loudness judgments
Abstract Human loudness judgments of time-varying sounds show a non-uniform temporal weighting pattern with increased weights at the beginning of a sound. Four experiments were conducted to investigate whether this primacy effect reoccurs after a silent gap of an appropriate duration that is inserted into a level-fluctuating sound. In three of the experiments, contiguous sounds as well as sounds containing silent gaps of different durations were presented. The temporal loudness weights were compared between the sounds that contained a gap and the sounds without a gap. The data showed that with increasing gap duration an increasingly pronounced primacy effect reoccurred on the second sound p…
Adapting to the pandemic: longitudinal effects of social restrictions on time perception and boredom during the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany
AbstractWith the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments introduced nationwide lockdowns that disrupted people’s daily routines and promoted social isolation. We applied a longitudinal online survey to investigate the mid-term effects of the mandated restrictions on the perceived passage of time (PPT) and boredom during and after a strict lockdown in Germany. One week after the beginning of the lockdown in March 2020, respondents reported a slower PPT and increased boredom compared to the pre-pandemic level. However, in the course of the lockdown, PPT accelerated and boredom decreased again until August 2020. Then, in October 2020, when incidence rates sharply rose and new restrictions were int…
Age-Correlated Incremental Consideration of Velocity Information in Relative Time-to-Arrival Judgments
International audience; One hundred fifty-one children and 43 adults judged which of 2 cartoon birds would be the first to arrive at a common finish line. Objects moved unidirectionally along parallel trajectories, either at the same or different speeds, and disappeared at different distances from the goal. Overall, 9-10-year-old children performed as well as adults, but 4-5- and 6-8-year-olds erred significantly more often. On trials for which distance to goal at disappearance was a valid cue, 4-5-year-olds scored 80% correct, and no differences were seen between 6-10-year-olds and adults. On the opposite type of trials, where the trailing bird would win the race, only adults retained thei…
Description of the data set for the manuscript "A machine learning approach to quantifying the specificity of color-emotion associations and their cultural differences".
Description of the data set
Spectro-Temporal Weighting of Loudness
Real-world sounds like speech or traffic noise typically exhibit spectro-temporal variability because the energy in different spectral regions evolves differently as a sound unfolds in time. However, it is currently not well understood how the energy in different spectral and temporal portions contributes to loudness. This study investigated how listeners weight different temporal and spectral components of a sound when judging its overall loudness. Spectral weights were measured for the combination of three loudness-matched narrowband noises with different center frequencies. To measure temporal weights, 1,020-ms stimuli were presented, which randomly changed in level every 100 ms. Tempora…
Arrival-time judgments on multiple-lane streets: the failure to ignore irrelevant traffic
How do road users decide whether or not they have enough time to cross a multiple-lane street with multiple approaching vehicles? Temporal judgments have been investigated for single cars approaching an intersection; however, close to nothing is known about how street crossing decisions are being made when several vehicles are simultaneously approaching in two adjacent lanes. This task is relatively common in urban environments. We report two simulator experiments in which drivers had to judge whether it would be safe to initiate street crossing in such cases. Matching traffic gaps (i.e., the temporal separation between two consecutive vehicles) were presented either with cars approaching o…
Temporal loudness weights are frequency specific
Previous work showed that the beginning of a sound is more important for the perception of loudness than later parts. When a short silent gap of sufficient duration is inserted into a sound, this primacy effect reoccurs in the second sound part after the gap. The present study investigates whether this temporal weighting occurs independently for different frequency bands. Sounds consisting of two bandpass noises were presented in four different conditions: (1) a simultaneous gap in both bands, (2) a gap in only the lower frequency band, (3) a gap in only the higher frequency band, or (4) no gap. In all conditions, the temporal loudness weights showed a primacy effect at sound onset. For the…
Wall patterns influence the perception of interior space
The texture of an object’s surface influences its perceived spatial extent. For example, Hermann von Helmholtz reported that a square patch with black and white stripes appears elongated perpendicular to the stripes’ orientation. This time-honoured finding stands in contrast with more recent recommendations by interior-design experts who suggest that stripe wall patterns make rooms appear elongated in the direction parallel to the stripes’ orientation. In a series of four experiments, we presented stripe wall patterns and varied the orientation of the stripes (horizontal vs. vertical) and their density (number of stripes per degree of visual angle). Subjects estimated the width and height …
Evaluation of Franz Marc’s Color Theory using Implicit Testing Procedures
In the early 20th century, the German expressionist painter Franz Marc formulated assumptions concerning the meanings of color, based on his individual sensations. He characterized the ‘cool’ blue as the ‘masculine principle’. Yellow represented the ‘feminine principle’ which he declared as ‘gentle, cheerful, and sensual’. This leaves red, the color he perceived as ‘brutal and heavy’. Here, we tested some of the color–meaning associations assumed by Franz Marc via implicit measures based on response times, using Single Category Implicit Association Tests. The participants had to classify words as belonging to one of two semantic categories (e.g., masculine or feminine) by pressing one of tw…
Does Affective Content of Sounds Affect Auditory Time-to-collision Estimation?
Jonauskaite_Supplemental_Method_and_Figs._S1-S5_rev – Supplemental material for Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity
Supplemental material, Jonauskaite_Supplemental_Method_and_Figs._S1-S5_rev for Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity by Domicele Jonauskaite, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Nele Dael, Daniel Oberfeld, Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, Abdulrahman S. Al-Rasheed, Jean-Philippe Antonietti, Victoria Bogushevskaya, Amer Chamseddine, Eka Chkonia, Violeta Corona, Eduardo Fonseca-Pedrero, Yulia A. Griber, Gina Grimshaw, Aya Ahmed Hasan, Jelena Havelka, Marco Hirnstein, Bodil S. A. Karlsson, Eric Laurent, Marjaana Lindeman, Lynn Marquardt, Philip Mefoh, Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, Alicia Pérez-Albéniz, Niloufar Pouyan, Maya Roinishvili, Lyudmyla Romanyuk, Al…
Judging the contact-times of multiple objects: Evidence for asymmetric interference.
The accuracy of time-to-contact (TTC) judgments for single approaching objects is well researched, however, close to nothing is known about our ability to make simultaneous TTC judgments for two or more objects. Such complex judgments are required in many everyday situations, for instance when crossing a multi-lane street or when engaged in multi-player ball games. We used a prediction-motion paradigm in which participants simultaneously estimated the absolute TTC of two objects, and compared the performance to a standard single-object condition. Results showed that the order of arrival of the two objects determined the accuracy of the TTC estimates: Estimation of the first-arriving object …
Loudness changes induced by a proximal sound: loudness enhancement, loudness recalibration, or both?
The effect of a forward masker on the loudness of a target tone in close temporal proximity was investigated. Loudness matches between a target and a comparison tone at the same frequency were obtained for a wide range of target and masker levels. Contrary to the hypothesis by Scharf, Buus, and Nieder [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 112, 807-810 (2002)], these matches could not be explained by an effect of the masker on the comparison loudness, which was measured by loudness matches between the comparison and a fourth tone separated in frequency from the comparison and the masker. The data thus demonstrate that a forward masker has an effect on the loudness of a proximal target. The results are compat…
Effects of Task-Irrelevant Cars on Judgments of Deceleration and Time-to-Contact During Car-Following
Rear-end collisions represent over 25% of crashes with other moving vehicles (NHTSA, 2005). Factors that potentially contribute to such accidents include a driver’s ability to respond to a lead car’s deceleration and to estimate how much time remains until a collision would occur (DeLucia & Tharanathan, 2009). Prior research (Oberfeld & Hecht, 2008) showed that time-to-contact (TTC) judgments of approaching objects were influenced by task-irrelevant distractor objects. This finding has implications for rear-end collisions when drivers must detect a lead car’s deceleration amidst surrounding cars. However, Oberfeld and Hecht simulated a stationary observer rather than a moving obser…
The decision process in forward-masked intensity discrimination: evidence from molecular analyses.
In a two-interval forced-choice intensity discrimination task presenting a fixed increment, the level of the forward masker in interval 1 and interval 2 was sampled independently from the same normal distribution on each trial. Mean and standard deviation of the distribution were varied. Correlational analyses of the trial-by-trial data revealed different decision strategies depending on the relation between mean masker level and standard level. If the two levels were identical, listeners tended to select the interval containing the higher-level masker, behaving like an energy detector at the output of a temporal window of integration. For mean masker level higher than the standard level, m…
The effect of furnishing on perceived spatial dimensions and spaciousness of interior space
Despite the ubiquity of interior space design, there is virtually no scientific research on the influence of furnishing on the perception of interior space. We conducted two experiments in which observers were asked to estimate the spatial dimensions (size of the room dimensions in meters and centimeters) and to judge subjective spaciousness of various rooms. Experiment 1 used true-to-scale model rooms with a square surface area. Furnishing affected both the perceived height and the spaciousness judgments. The furnished room was perceived as higher but less spacious. In Experiment 2, rooms with different square surface areas and constant physical height were presented in virtual reality. Fu…
Author response: Individual differences in selective attention predict speech identification at a cocktail party
Temporal weighting of loudness: Comparison between two different psychophysical tasks
International audience; Psychophysical studies on loudness have so far examined the temporal weighting of loudness solely in level-discrimination tasks. Typically, listeners were asked to discriminate hundreds of level-fluctuating sounds regarding their global loudness. Temporal weights, i.e., the importance of each temporal portion of the stimuli for the loudness judgment, were then estimated from listeners' responses. Consistent non-uniform " u-shaped " temporal weighting patterns were observed, with greater weights assigned to the first and the last temporal portions of the stimuli, revealing significant primacy and recency effects, respectively. In this study, the question was addressed…
Fashion versus perception: the impact of surface lightness on the perceived dimensions of interior space.
Objectives: We compare expert opinion with perceptual judgment regarding the influence of color on the perceived height and width of interior rooms. Background: We hypothesize that contrary to popular belief, ceiling and wall lightness have additive effects on perceived height, whereas the lightness contrast between these surfaces is less important. We assessed the intuitions of architectural experts as to which surface colors maximize apparent height and compared these intuitions with psychophysical height and width estimates for rooms differing in ceiling, floor, and wall lightness. Method: Experiment 1 was a survey of architectural experts and nonexperts. Experiments 2 and 3 presented v…
Effects of Adjacent Vehicles on Judgments of a Lead Car During Car Following.
Objective: Two experiments were conducted to determine whether detection of the onset of a lead car’s deceleration and judgments of its time to contact (TTC) were affected by the presence of vehicles in lanes adjacent to the lead car. Background: In a previous study, TTC judgments of an approaching object by a stationary observer were influenced by an adjacent task-irrelevant approaching object. The implication is that vehicles in lanes adjacent to a lead car could influence a driver’s ability to detect the lead car’s deceleration and to make judgments of its TTC. Method: Displays simulated car-following scenes in which two vehicles in adjacent lanes were either present or absent. Participa…
Audiovisual Integration of Time-to-Contact Information for Approaching Objects.
Previous studies of time-to-collision (TTC) judgments of approaching objects focused on effectiveness of visual TTC information in the optical expansion pattern (e.g., visual tau, disparity). Fewer studies examined effectiveness of auditory TTC information in the pattern of increasing intensity (auditory tau), or measured integration of auditory and visual TTC information. Here, participants judged TTC of an approaching object presented in the visual or auditory modality, or both concurrently. TTC information provided by the modalities was jittered slightly against each other, so that auditory and visual TTC were not perfectly correlated. A psychophysical reverse correlation approach was us…
Audiovisual time-to-collision estimation for accelerating vehicles: The acoustic signature of electric vehicles impairs pedestrians' judgments
To avoid collisions, pedestrians intending to cross a road need to accurately estimate the time-to-collision (TTC) of an approaching vehicle. For TTC estimation, auditory information can be considered particularly relevant when the approaching vehicle accelerates. The sound of vehicles with internal combustion engine (ICEVs) provides characteristic auditory information about the acceleration state (increasing speed and engine load). However, for electric vehicles (EVs), the acoustic signature during acceleration is less salient. Although the auditory detection of EVs has been studied extensively, there is no research on potential effects of the altered acoustic signature of EVs on TTC estim…
Meta-analysis of time perception and temporal processing in schizophrenia: Differential effects on precision and accuracy
Numerous studies have reported that time perception and temporal processing are impaired in schizophrenia. In a meta-analytical review, we differentiate between time perception (judgments of time intervals) and basic temporal processing (e.g., judgments of temporal order) as well as between effects on accuracy (deviation of estimates from the veridical value) and precision (variability of judgments). In a meta-regression approach, we also included the specific tasks and the different time interval ranges as covariates. We considered 68 publications of the past 65years, and meta-analyzed data from 957 patients with schizophrenia and 1060 healthy control participants. Independent of tasks and…
Measuring Perceived Ceiling Height in a Visual Comparison Task
When judging interior space, a dark ceiling is judged to be lower than a light ceiling. The method of metric judgments (e.g., on a centimetre scale) that has typically been used in such tasks may reflect a genuine perceptual effect or it may reflect a cognitively mediated impression. We employed a height-matching method in which perceived ceiling height had to be matched with an adjustable pillar, thus obtaining psychometric functions that allowed for an estimation of the point of subjective equality (PSE) and the difference limen (DL). The height-matching method developed in this paper allows for a direct visual match and does not require metric judgment. It has the added advantage of pro…
Factors limiting performance in a multitone intensity-discrimination task: disentangling non-optimal decision weights and increased internal noise.
To identify factors limiting performance in multitone intensity discrimination, we presented sequences of five pure tones alternating in level between loud (85 dB SPL) and soft (30, 55, or 80 dB SPL). In the "overall-intensity task", listeners detected a level increment on all of the five tones. In the "masking task", the level increment was imposed only on the soft tones, rendering the soft tones targets and loud tones task-irrelevant maskers. Decision weights quantifying the importance of the five tone levels for the decision were estimated using methods of molecular psychophysics. Compatible with previous studies, listeners placed higher weights on the loud tones than on the soft tones i…
AMBIENT LIGHTING MODIFIES THE FLAVOR OF WINE
It is well known that the color of a beverage can influence its flavor. We conducted three experiments to investigate the effect of the ambient room color on flavor, while leaving the color of the beverage unaltered. We chose white wine as the beverage and used several methods to fully explore the potential role of ambient light. First, a group of wine buyers made judgments on flavor and global liking while tasting a Riesling on site at a local winery. Ambient color influenced the subjective value of the wine. Wine tasted better in blue or red environments as compared with green and white. A second group was tested in the laboratory. Ambient color modified the taste, but not the odor of the…
Tactile perceptual processes and their relationship to medically unexplained symptoms and health anxiety
Abstract Objective The Somatic Signal Detection Task (SSDT; Lloyd, Manson, Brown and Poliakoff, 2008) is an innovative paradigm to study perceptual processes related to physical symptoms. It allows examining touch illusions as a laboratory analog of medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) according to the cognitive model of MUS proposed by Brown (2004). The present study compared psychopathologic measures of MUS and health anxiety with SSDT parameters. Furthermore, we aimed to define a reliable measurement of tactile perception threshold. Methods 67 participants of a student population reported whether they detected tactile stimuli at their fingertip which were presented in half of the test tr…
Time perception in depression: a meta-analysis.
Background Depressive patients frequently report to perceive time as going by very slowly. Potential effects of depression on duration judgments have been investigated mostly by means of four different time perception tasks: verbal time estimation, time production, time reproduction, and duration discrimination. Ratings of the subjective flow of time have also been obtained. Methods By means of a classical random-effects meta-regression model and a robust variance estimation model, this meta-analysis aims at evaluating the inconsistent results from 16 previous studies on time perception in depression, representing data of 433 depressive patients and 485 healthy control subjects. Results Dep…
The Sun Is no Fun without Rain
Across cultures, people associate colours with emotions. Here, we test the hypothesis that one driver of this cross-modal correspondence is the physical environment we live in. We focus on a prime example – the association of yellow with joy, – which conceivably arises because yellow is reminiscent of life-sustaining sunshine and pleasant weather. If so, this association should be especially strong in countries where sunny weather is a rare occurrence. We analysed yellow-joy associations of 6625 participants from 55 countries to investigate how yellow-joy associations varied geographically, climatologically, and seasonally. We assessed the distance to the equator, sunshine, precipitation, a…
Crossing a Multi-Lane Street: Irrelevant Cars Increase Unsafe Behavior
Before crossing a road or an intersection, road users have to determine among the surrounding traffic whether or not they have enough time to safely complete their maneuver. Temporal judgments have been investigated for single cars approaching an intersection, however, close to nothing is known about how street-crossing decisions are being made when several vehicles are simultaneously approaching in two adjacent lanes. We conducted a simulator experiment in which observers indicated whether or not they had enough time to complete safe street crossing. Traffic gaps were presented either with a single or two oncoming cars on different lanes, in such a way that in all cases, only the shortest …
Surface Lightness Influences Perceived Room Height
Surprisingly little scientific research has been conducted on the effects of colour and lightness on the perception of spaciousness. Practitioners and architects typically suggest that a room's ceiling appears higher when it is painted lighter than the walls, while darker ceilings appear lower. Employing a virtual reality setting, we studied the effects of the lightness of different room surfaces on perceived height in two psychophysical experiments. Observers judged the height of rooms varying in physical height as well as in the lightness of ceiling, floor, and walls. Experiment 1 showed the expected increase of perceived height with increases in ceiling lightness. Unexpectedly, the perce…
Which Attribute of Ceiling Color Influences Perceived Room Height?
Objective:We investigate effects of the hue, saturation, and luminance of ceiling color on the perceived height of interior spaces.Background:Previous studies have reported that the perceived height of an interior space is influenced by the luminance of the ceiling, but not by the luminance contrast between ceiling and walls: brighter ceilings appeared higher than darker ceilings, irrespective of wall and floor luminance. However, these studies used solely achromatic colors. We report an experiment in which we extend these findings to effects of chromatic ceiling colors.Methods:We presented stereoscopic room simulations on a head-mounted display (Oculus Rift DK2) and varied hue (red, green,…
User acceptance of automated public transport
Abstract Autonomous driving is receiving increasing attention in the automotive industry as well as in public transport. However, it is still unclear whether users are willing to use automated public transportation at all. In order to answer this and other questions, the transport company of the city of Mainz, Germany, tested the autonomous minibus EMMA (Elektro-Mobilitat Mainz Autonom) on a 600-meter-long test track in public space. The study presented here was conducted with the aim of exploring crucial determinants for the use of an autonomous minibus. On the basis of established acceptance models, a questionnaire was developed, which was completed in a field survey by a total of 942 par…
Binaural release from masking in forward-masked intensity discrimination: Evidence for effects of selective attention
In a forward-masked intensity discrimination task, we manipulated the perceived lateralization of the masker via variation of the interaural time difference (ITD). The maskers and targets were 500 Hz pure tones with a duration of 30 ms. Standards of 30 and 60 dB SPL were combined with 60 or 90 dB SPL maskers. As expected, the presentation of a forward masker perceived as lateralized to the other side of the head as the target resulted in a significantly smaller elevation of the intensity difference limen than a masker lateralized ipsilaterally. This binaural release from masking in forward-masked intensity discrimination cannot be explained by peripheral mechanisms because varying the ITD l…
Temporal-range estimation of multiple objects: evidence for an early bottleneck.
When making parallel time-to-contact (TTC) estimates of two approaching objects, the two respective TTC estimates interfere with one another in an asymmetric fashion. The TTC of the later-arriving object is systematically overestimated, while the estimated TTC for the first-arriving object is as accurate as in a condition presenting only a single object. This asymmetric interference points to a processing bottleneck that could be due to early (e.g., during the estimation of the TTC from the optic flow) or late (e.g., during the timing of the response or the motor execution) constraints in the TTC estimation process. We used a Sperling-like prediction-motion task to differentiate between the…
A comparison of the temporal weighting of annoyance and loudness
The influence of single temporal portions of a sound on global annoyance and loudness judgments was measured using perceptual weight analysis. The stimuli were 900-ms noise samples randomly changing in level every 100 ms. For loudness judgments, Pedersen and Ellermeier [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 123, 963-972 (2008)] found that listeners attach greater weight to the beginning and ending than to the middle of a stimulus. Qualitatively similar weights were expected for annoyance. Annoyance and loudness judgments were obtained from 12 listeners in a two-interval forced-choice task. The results demonstrated a primacy effect for the temporal weighting of both annoyance and loudness. However, a signific…
The mid-difference hump in forward-masked intensity discrimination
Forward-masked intensity-difference limens (DLs) for pure-tone standards presented at low, medium, and high levels were obtained for a wide range of masker-standard level differences. At a standard level of 25 dB SPL, the masker had a significant effect on intensity resolution, and the data showed a mid-difference hump: The DL elevation was greater at intermediate than at large masker-standard level differences. These results support the hypothesis that the effect of a forward masker on intensity resolution is modulated by the similarity between the masker and the standard. For a given masker-standard level difference, the effect of the masker on the DL was larger for a 55-dB SPL than for t…
Sequential grouping modulates the effect of non-simultaneous masking on auditory intensity resolution.
The presence of non-simultaneous maskers can result in strong impairment in auditory intensity resolution relative to a condition without maskers, and causes a complex pattern of effects that is difficult to explain on the basis of peripheral processing. We suggest that the failure of selective attention to the target tones is a useful framework for understanding these effects. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the sequential grouping of the targets and the maskers into separate auditory objects facilitates selective attention and therefore reduces the masker-induced impairment in intensity resolution. In Experiment 1, a condition favoring the processing of the maskers and the targ…
Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity
Many of us “see red,” “feel blue,” or “turn green with envy.” Are such color-emotion associations fundamental to our shared cognitive architecture, or are they cultural creations learned through our languages and traditions? To answer these questions, we tested emotional associations of colors in 4,598 participants from 30 nations speaking 22 native languages. Participants associated 20 emotion concepts with 12 color terms. Pattern-similarity analyses revealed universal color-emotion associations (average similarity coefficient r = .88). However, local differences were also apparent. A machine-learning algorithm revealed that nation predicted color-emotion associations above and beyond tho…
Evaluation of a model of temporal weights in loudness judgments
The onset of a sound receives a higher weight than later portions in time when its loudness is assessed, an effect commonly referred to as primacy effect. It is investigated if this effect can be predicted on the basis of an exponentially decaying function where the weight assigned to a temporal portion of a sound is the integral of this function over the segment duration. To test this model, temporal loudness weights were measured for sounds with different segment durations and total durations. The model successfully predicted essential aspects of the data.
Cognitive performance and emotion are indifferent to ambient color
Folklore has it that ambient color has the power to relax or arouse the observer and enhance performance when executing cognitive tasks. We picked a number of commercially available colors that allegedly have the power to alter cognitive performance and the emotional state, and exposed subjects to them while solving a battery of cognitive tasks. The colors were “Cool Down Pink”, which is said to produce relaxing effects and reduce effort, “Energy Red”, allegedly enhancing performance via increased arousal, “Relaxing Blue”, which is said to enhance attention and concentration, as well as white as a control. In a between-subjects design, a total of 170 high school students carried out five ta…
Data set for the manuscript "A machine learning approach to quantifying the specificity of color-emotion associations and their cultural differences"
Each row represents the ratings of the intensity of 20 emotions associated with the color term given by variable "color", by participant identified by variable "subject"
Data from: Individual differences in selective attention predict speech identification at a cocktail party
Listeners with normal hearing show considerable individual differences in speech understanding when competing speakers are present, as in a crowded restaurant. Here, we show that one source of this variance are individual differences in the ability to focus selective attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors. In 50 young normal-hearing listeners, the performance in tasks measuring auditory and visual selective attention was associated with sentence identification in the presence of spatially separated competing speakers. Together, the measures of selective attention explained a similar proportion of variance as the binaural sensitivity for the acoustic temporal fine stru…
Data set for the manuscript "A machine learning approach to quantify the specificity of color-emotion associations and their cultural differences".
Each row represents the ratings of the intensity of 20 emotions associated with the color term given by variable "color", by participant identified by variable "subject"