Confusion Patterns Research Articles

Musicianship Modulates Cortical Effects of Attention on Processing Musical Triads.

Background: Many studies have demonstrated the benefits of long-term music training (i.e., musicianship) on the neural processing of sound, including simple tones and speech. However, the effects of musicianship on the encoding of simultaneously presented pitches, in the form of complex musical chords, is less well established. Presumably, musicians' stronger familiarity and active experience with tonal music might enhance harmonic pitch representations, perhaps in an attention-dependent manner. Additionally, attention might influence chordal encoding differently across the auditory system. To this end, we explored the effects of long-term music training and attention on the processing of musical chords at the brainstem and cortical levels. Method: Young adult participants were separated into musician and nonmusician groups based on the extent of formal music training. While recording EEG, listeners heard isolated musical triads that differed only in the chordal third: major, minor, and detuned (4% sharper third from major). Participants were asked to correctly identify chords via key press during active stimulus blocks and watched a silent movie during passive blocks. We logged behavioral identification accuracy and reaction times and calculated information transfer based on the behavioral chord confusion patterns. EEG data were analyzed separately to distinguish between cortical (event-related potential, ERP) and subcortical (frequency-following response, FFR) evoked responses. Results: We found musicians were (expectedly) more accurate, though not faster, than nonmusicians in chordal identification. For subcortical FFRs, responses showed stimulus chord effects but no group differences. However, for cortical ERPs, whereas musicians displayed P2 (~150 ms) responses that were invariant to attention, nonmusicians displayed reduced P2 during passive listening. Listeners' degree of behavioral information transfer (i.e., success in distinguishing chords) was also better in musicians and correlated with their neural differentiation of chords in the ERPs (but not high-frequency FFRs). Conclusions: Our preliminary results suggest long-term music training strengthens even the passive cortical processing of musical sounds, supporting more automated brain processing of musical chords with less reliance on attention. Our results also suggest that the degree to which listeners can behaviorally distinguish chordal triads is directly related to their neural specificity to musical sounds primarily at cortical rather than subcortical levels. FFR attention effects were likely not observed due to the use of high-frequency stimuli (>220 Hz), which restrict FFRs to brainstem sources.

Vision plays a calibrating role in discriminating threat-related vocal emotions.

The ability to reliably discriminate vocal expressions of emotion is crucial to engage in successful social interactions. This process is arguably more crucial for blind individuals, since they cannot extract social information from faces and bodies, and therefore chiefly rely on voices to infer the emotional state of their interlocutors. Blind have demonstrated superior abilities in several aspects of auditory perception, but research on their ability to discriminate vocal features is still scarce and has provided unclear results. Here, we used a gating psychophysical paradigm to test whether early blind people would differ from individually matched sighted controls at the recognition of emotional expressions. Surprisingly, blind people showed lower performance than controls in discriminating specific vocal emotions. We presented segments of nonlinguistic emotional vocalizations of increasing duration (100-400 ms), portraying five basic emotions (fear, happy, sad, disgust, and angry), and we asked our participants for an explicit emotion categorization task. We then calculated sensitivity indices and confusion patterns of their performance. We observed better performance of the sighted group in the discrimination of angry and fearful expression, with no between-group differences for other emotions. This result supports the view that vision plays a calibrating role for specific threat-related emotions specifically. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A Sticky Situation: Diagnosing Post-Transfusion Purpura in the Setting of Longstanding, Transfusion-Dependent AML

Background Post-transfusion purpura (PTP), a commonly underreported adverse transfusion event. It is defined as severe thrombocytopenia with related sequelae occurring 5-10 days of transfusion where both transfused and autologous platelets are destroyed. Low cell counts may be masked by other conditions (i.e. AML) and there is a paucity of literature on cases of PTP especially in concurrent pancytopenia. Swift diagnosis is critical for management. This case presents a unique opportunity to examine PTP in a patient with a complex hematopathologic malignancy history. Methods Relevant clinical data was obtained through examination of available medical records, concurrent ancillary diagnostic testing, and serological send-out testing was performed. Appropriate investigation and evaluation of repeated transfusion reactions with clinical symptomatology in accordance with available bio-vigilance surveillance guidelines aided in the diagnosis. Findings A 73-year-old female patient presented to the emergency department with acute, worsening fatigue, lethargy, pallor, and shortness of breath. She was found at home by emergency medical services with bright red blood covering her legs, originating from the rectum, several longstanding pressure ulcers, and an oxygen saturation in the 80s. The initial physical exam revealed a cachectic, ill-appearing woman who was tachypneic, wheezing, with new and old blood at anus, generalized weakness, fatigue, shortness of breath, cough, myalgias, and diffuse bruising of various sizes. There was no loss of consciousness or history of anticoagulant therapy. The patient had a complex medical history which included acute myeloid leukemia with concurrent chemotherapy complicated by longstanding, transfusion-dependent pancytopenia, lung adenocarcinoma status-post radiation therapy now in remission, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on continuous home oxygen, chronic intermittent bilateral lower extremity rashes secondary to adult-onset Still's disease, and multiple visits to the emergency department, inpatient admissions, and numerous outpatient infusions for the management of pancytopenia. The patient's initial laboratory workup in the emergency room setting demonstrated clear, previously known, pancytopenia along with severe acidosis, marked anemia, and derangements of coagulation testing. With numerous visits to both the emergency department and outpatient infusion centers, the patient had previous transfusion reactions which ranged from mild allergic to repeating patterns of fulminant weakness, lethargy, and confusion relating to the timing of transfusions. With increasing skin manifestations of purpuric skin lesions, severely acute thrombocytopenia regardless of HLA matched or compatible platelet units, and results of send-out serology demonstrating 100% reactivity to all platelets and specific HPA antibodies, the diagnosis of post-transfusion purpura was made. Conclusion Despite this patient succumbing to diffuse hypoxic anemia and suffering a fatal cardiac dysrhythmia, the results of reference laboratory send-out serology revealed positivity in 100% of platelets crossmatched and the presence of antibodies to HLA Class I and HPA-2b, which satisfy the clinical and serologic criteria for post-transfusion purpura and represent a rare diagnostic finding.

Revealing perceptual structure through input variation: cross-accent categorization of vowels in five accents of English

This paper characterizes the perceptual structure of vowel systems in five regional accents of English, from Australia (A), New Zealand (Z), London (L), Yorkshire (Y), and Newcastle upon Tyne (N), on the basis of “whole system” vowel categorization experiments. We established patterns of within-accent vowel confusions, and then explored cross-accent perception, assessing how listeners from one accent background categorize vowels from another. Our experimental task required mapping continuous phonetic dimensions to perceptual categories in the absence of phonotactic and lexical cues to vowel identity and socio-indexical information about the talker. Our results show that, without these sources of information, there is uncertainty in vowel categorization, even for native accent vowels, and that this degree of uncertainty increases for unfamiliar accents. The patterns of cross-accent perception largely reflect the accent-specific perceptual structure of the listener, as opposed to adaptations to the stimulus accents. This finding contrasts with the type of active talker adaptation found with tasks offering lexical information about vowel identity and indexical information about the talker.

Web-based psychoacoustics: Hearing screening, infrastructure, and validation

Anonymous web-based experiments are increasingly used in many domains of behavioral research. However, online studies of auditory perception, especially of psychoacoustic phenomena pertaining to low-level sensory processing, are challenging because of limited available control of the acoustics, and the inability to perform audiometry to confirm normal-hearing status of participants. Here, we outline our approach to mitigate these challenges and validate our procedures by comparing web-based measurements to lab-based data on a range of classic psychoacoustic tasks. Individual tasks were created using jsPsych, an open-source JavaScript front-end library. Dynamic sequences of psychoacoustic tasks were implemented using Django, an open-source library for web applications, and combined with consent pages, questionnaires, and debriefing pages. Subjects were recruited via Prolific, a subject recruitment platform for web-based studies. Guided by a meta-analysis of lab-based data, we developed and validated a screening procedure to select participants for (putative) normal-hearing status based on their responses in a suprathreshold task and a survey. Headphone use was standardized by supplementing procedures from prior literature with a binaural hearing task. Individuals meeting all criteria were re-invited to complete a range of classic psychoacoustic tasks. For the re-invited participants, absolute thresholds were in excellent agreement with lab-based data for fundamental frequency discrimination, gap detection, and sensitivity to interaural time delay and level difference. Furthermore, word identification scores, consonant confusion patterns, and co-modulation masking release effect also matched lab-based studies. Our results suggest that web-based psychoacoustics is a viable complement to lab-based research. Source code for our infrastructure is provided.

Intelligibility of Word-Initial Obstruent Consonants in Mandarin-Speaking Prelingually Deafened Children With Cochlear Implants.

This study assessed the intelligibility of obstruent consonants in prelingually deafened Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs). Twenty-two Mandarin-speaking children with normal hearing (NH) aged 3.25-10.0 years and 35 Mandarin-speaking children with CIs aged 3.77-15.0 years were recruited to produce a list of Mandarin words composed of 17 word-initial obstruent consonants in different vowel contexts. The children with CIs were assigned to chronological age-matched (CA) and hearing age-matched (HA) subgroups with reference to the NH controls. One hundred naïve NH adult listeners were recruited for a consonant identification task that consisted of a total of 2,663 stimulus tokens through an online research platform. For each child speaker, the consonant productions were judged by seven to 12 different adult listeners. An average percentage of consonants correct was calculated across all listeners for each consonant. The CI children in both the CA and HA subgroups showed lower intelligibility in their consonant productions than the NH controls. Among the 17 obstruents, both CI subgroups showed higher intelligibility for stops, but they demonstrated major problems with the sibilant fricatives and affricates and showed a different confusion pattern from the NH controls on these sibilants. Of the three places (alveolar, alveolopalatal, and retroflex) in Mandarin sibilants, both CI subgroups showed the lowest intelligibility and the greatest difficulties with alveolar sounds. For the NH children, there was a significant positive relationship between overall consonant intelligibility and chronological age. For the children with CIs, the best fit regression model revealed significant effects of chronological age and age at implantation, with their quadratic terms included. Mandarin-speaking children with CIs experience major challenges in the three-way place contrasts of sibilant sounds in consonant production. Chronological age and the combined effect of CI-related time variables play important roles in the development of obstruent consonants in the CI children.

PHONEME RECOGNITION AND CONFUSIONS IN PATIENTS WITH SENSORINEURAL HEARING LOSS

Hearing impaired listeners show different phoneme confusions during speech recognition testing. The aim of the study was to analyze phoneme recognition in patients with sensorineural hearing loss during word recognition testing with monosyllable words, as well as, to compare consonant confusions in different vowel context. Recognition of 18 initial and final consonants was analyzed in a total of 698 presentations of the words. There were 1154 (82.7%) correct recognitions and 100 consonant confusions (7.2%). The patients did not response at a total of 71 presentations of the words which means that consonants in 142 cases (10.2%) were not recognized, nor confused. There are no consonant confusion patterns during suprathreshold testing with real words. In cases of phoneme confusions, listeners replace the stimulus word with another word from the lexical neighborhood. In terms of the vowel context, the consonants are the most easily identified in the context of the vowel /a/.

Comparable Encoding, Comparable Perceptual Pattern: Acoustic and Electric Hearing.

Perception with electric neuroprostheses is sometimes expected to be simulated using properly designed physical stimuli. Here, we examined a new acoustic vocoder model for electric hearing with cochlear implants (CIs) and hypothesized that comparable speech encoding can lead to comparable perceptual patterns for CI and normal hearing (NH) listeners. Speech signals were encoded using FFT-based signal processing stages including band-pass filtering, temporal envelope extraction, maxima selection, and amplitude compression and quantization. These stages were specifically implemented in the same manner by an Advanced Combination Encoder (ACE) strategy in CI processors and Gaussian-enveloped Tones (GET) or Noise (GEN) vocoders for NH. Adaptive speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in noise were measured using four Mandarin sentence corpora. Initial consonant (11 monosyllables) and final vowel (20 monosyllables) recognition were also measured. Naïve NH listeners were tested using vocoded speech with the proposed GET/GEN vocoders as well as conventional vocoders (controls). Experienced CI listeners were tested using their daily-used processors. Results showed that: 1) there was a significant training effect on GET vocoded speech perception; 2) the GEN vocoded scores (SRTs with four corpora and consonant and vowel recognition scores) as well as the phoneme-level confusion pattern matched with the CI scores better than controls. The findings suggest that the same signal encoding implementations may lead to similar perceptual patterns simultaneously in multiple perception tasks. This study highlights the importance of faithfully replicating all signal processing stages in the modeling of perceptual patterns in sensory neuroprostheses. This approach has the potential to enhance our understanding of CI perception and accelerate the engineering of prosthetic interventions. The GET/GEN MATLAB program is freely available at https://github.com/BetterCI/GETVocoder.

Altered nonlinear Granger causality interactions in the large-scale brain networks of patients with schizophrenia

Objective. It has been demonstrated that schizophrenia (SZ) is characterized by functional dysconnectivity involving extensive brain networks. However, the majority of previous studies utilizing resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to infer abnormal functional connectivity (FC) in patients with SZ have focused on the linear correlation that one brain region may influence another, ignoring the inherently nonlinear properties of fMRI signals. Approach. In this paper, we present a neural Granger causality (NGC) technique for examining the changes in SZ’s nonlinear causal couplings. We develop static and dynamic NGC-based analyses of large-scale brain networks at several network levels, estimating complicated temporal and causal relationships in SZ patients. Main results. We find that the NGC-based FC matrices can detect large and significant differences between the SZ and healthy control groups at both the regional and subnetwork scales. These differences are persistent and significantly overlapped at various network sparsities regardless of whether the brain networks were built using static or dynamic techniques. In addition, compared to controls, patients with SZ exhibited extensive NGC confusion patterns throughout the entire brain. Significance. These findings imply that the NGC-based FCs may be a useful method for quantifying the abnormalities in the causal influences of patients with SZ, hence shedding fresh light on the pathophysiology of this disorder.

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Fault detection and isolation of gas turbine: Hierarchical classification and confidence rate computation

In this paper, a Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) system based on an ensemble-based hierarchical classifier is devised to detect and isolate twelve typical turbine faulty scenarios and a healthy scenario. The hierarchical classifier is designed based on eight studied classifiers' best-practice confusion patterns, ranging from classical to state-of-the-art methods. The proposed hierarchical classifier discriminates five faulty classes with almost perfect accuracy while increasing the accuracy of healthy scenario discrimination by 10%, which is particularly important since it significantly reduces the false alarm rate for any form of fault. The overall accuracy of classification is improved by 2%, as well. Along with the classifier, an appropriate notion of confidence rate helps evaluate the classifier's decisions, especially when unlabeled data are involved. This motivation leads to devising a confidence rate concept that suits the devised classifier well. The obtained results show that the introduced confidence rate changes monotonically with classification accuracy. In the case of the high confidence rate of unlabeled data, this property is utilized to label the data with high accuracy. The proposed confidence rate is particularly effective in decision-making in the labeling of challenging mixed-up scenarios. Obtained results show that the classifier's decisions are reliable, with a confidence rate greater than 0.7. The developed FDI system is examined with simulated and real data, where obtained results verify the satisfactory performance of the system.

Testing perceptual flexibility in speech through the categorization of whistled Spanish consonants by French speakers.

Whistled speech is a form of modified speech where, in non-tonal languages, vowels and consonants are augmented and transposed to whistled frequencies, simplifying their timbre. According to previous studies, these transformations maintain some level of vowel recognition for naive listeners. Here, in a behavioral experiment, naive listeners' capacities for the categorization of four whistled consonants (/p/, /k/, /t/, and /s/) were analyzed. Results show patterns of correct responses and confusions that provide new insights into whistled speech perception, highlighting the importance of frequency modulation cues, transposed from phoneme formants, as well as the perceptual flexibility in processing these cues.

Decoding the temporal dynamics of spoken word and nonword processing from EEG

The efficiency of spoken word recognition is essential for real-time communication. There is consensus that this efficiency relies on an implicit process of activating multiple word candidates that compete for recognition as the acoustic signal unfolds in real-time. However, few methods capture the neural basis of this dynamic competition on a msec-by-msec basis. This is crucial for understanding the neuroscience of language, and for understanding hearing, language and cognitive disorders in people for whom current behavioral methods are not suitable. We applied machine-learning techniques to standard EEG signals to decode which word was heard on each trial and analyzed the patterns of confusion over time. Results mirrored psycholinguistic findings: Early on, the decoder was equally likely to report the target (e.g., baggage) or a similar sounding competitor (badger), but by around 500 msec, competitors were suppressed. Follow up analyses show that this is robust across EEG systems (gel and saline), with fewer channels, and with fewer trials. Results are robust within individuals and show high reliability. This suggests a powerful and simple paradigm that can assess the neural dynamics of speech decoding, with potential applications for understanding lexical development in a variety of clinical disorders.

Production accuracy of word-initial consonants in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants

The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of consonant production of children with cochlear implants (CIs) judged by naïve adult listeners. A total of 57 Mandarin-speaking children (22 with normal hearing and 35 with CIs) were recruited to produce a list of Mandarin words composed of 17 word-initial obstruent consonants in three different vowel contexts. A total number of 2628 tokens were generated and were divided into 10 subsets. One hundred Mandarin-speaking naïve adult listeners were recruited to identify the consonant productions through Gorilla, the online research platform. Each listener was randomly assigned to one subset. For each child speaker, the consonant productions were judged by 7–12 adult listeners and an average accuracy rate was calculated across all listeners for each consonant. The results revealed that the children with CIs showed lower accuracies and different confusion patterns on their consonant productions than the normal hearing controls. In particular, they demonstrated higher accuracy for stops but had major problems with the fricatives and affricates involved in the alveolar—alveolopalatal—retroflex postalveolar three-way sibilant contrast. Of the three places of the sibilant contrast, they showed the greatest difficulties for the alveolar sounds.

Effects of mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss and signal amplification on vocal emotion recognition in middle-aged–older individuals

Previous research has shown deficits in vocal emotion recognition in sub-populations of individuals with hearing loss, making this a high priority research topic. However, previous research has only examined vocal emotion recognition using verbal material, in which emotions are expressed through emotional prosody. There is evidence that older individuals with hearing loss suffer from deficits in general prosody recognition, not specific to emotional prosody. No study has examined the recognition of non-verbal vocalization, which constitutes another important source for the vocal communication of emotions. It might be the case that individuals with hearing loss have specific difficulties in recognizing emotions expressed through prosody in speech, but not non-verbal vocalizations. We aim to examine whether vocal emotion recognition difficulties in middle- aged-to older individuals with sensorineural mild-moderate hearing loss are better explained by deficits in vocal emotion recognition specifically, or deficits in prosody recognition generally by including both sentences and non-verbal expressions. Furthermore a, some of the studies which have concluded that individuals with mild-moderate hearing loss have deficits in vocal emotion recognition ability have also found that the use of hearing aids does not improve recognition accuracy in this group. We aim to examine the effects of linear amplification and audibility on the recognition of different emotions expressed both verbally and non-verbally. Besides examining accuracy for different emotions we will also look at patterns of confusion (which specific emotions are mistaken for other specific emotion and at which rates) during both amplified and non-amplified listening, and we will analyze all material acoustically and relate the acoustic content to performance. Together these analyses will provide clues to effects of amplification on the perception of different emotions. For these purposes, a total of 70 middle-aged-older individuals, half with mild-moderate hearing loss and half with normal hearing will perform a computerized forced-choice vocal emotion recognition task with and without amplification.

Discriminative and semantic feature selection for place recognition towards dynamic environments

Features play an important role in various visual tasks, especially in visual place recognition applied to perceptually changing environments. We address challenges in place recognition due to dynamic and confusable patterns by proposing a discriminative and semantic feature selection network named DSFeat in this study. With supervision of both semantic information and attention mechanism, the pixel-wise stability of features can be estimated, which indicates the probability of a static and discriminative region where features are extracted. We can then select features that are insensitive to dynamic interference and distinguishable for correct matching. The designed feature selection model is evaluated in place recognition and SLAM system using several public datasets with varying appearances and viewpoints. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Note that our proposed method can be easily integrated into any feature-based SLAM system.

Temporal fine structure influences voicing confusions for consonant identification in multi-talker babble.

To understand the mechanisms of speech perception in everyday listening environments, it is important to elucidate the relative contributions of different acoustic cues in transmitting phonetic content. Previous studies suggest that the envelope of speech in different frequency bands conveys most speech content, while the temporal fine structure (TFS) can aid in segregating target speech from background noise. However, the role of TFS in conveying phonetic content beyond what envelopes convey for intact speech in complex acoustic scenes is poorly understood. The present study addressed this question using online psychophysical experiments to measure the identification of consonants in multi-talker babble for intelligibility-matched intact and 64-channel envelope-vocoded stimuli. Consonant confusion patterns revealed that listeners had a greater tendency in the vocoded (versus intact) condition to be biased toward reporting that they heard an unvoiced consonant, despite envelope and place cues being largely preserved. This result was replicated when babble instances were varied across independent experiments, suggesting that TFS conveys voicing information beyond what is conveyed by envelopes for intact speech in babble. Given that multi-talker babble is a masker that is ubiquitous in everyday environments, this finding has implications for the design of assistive listening devices such as cochlear implants.

Language Experience and Subjective Word Familiarity on the Multimodal Perception of Non-native Vowels.

The present study investigated native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers' perception of the French vowels /ɔ̃, ɑ̃, ɛ̃, o/. Thirty-four American-English learners of French and 33 native speakers of Parisian French were asked to identify 60 monosyllabic words produced by a native speaker in three modalities of presentation: auditory-only (A-only); audiovisual (AV); and visual-only (V-only). The L2 participants also completed a vocabulary knowledge test of the words presented in the perception experiment that aimed to explore whether subjective word familiarity affected speech perception. Results showed that overall performance was better in the AV and A-only conditions for the two groups with the pattern of confusion differing across modalities. The lack of audiovisual benefit was not due to the vowel contrasts being not visually salient enough, as shown by the native group's performance in the V-only modality, but to the L2 group's weaker sensitivity to visual information. Additionally, a significant relationship was found between subjective word familiarity and AV and A-only (but not V-only) perception of non-native contrasts.

Thai tonal confusion patterns in the production of L1 Chinese Zhuang students

Abstract This paper examines Thai tonal confusion patterns in two sample groups of Chinese Zhuang Students with the research hypothesis that the experimental group who possess Zhuang language experience as native speakers (C+Z) would have better tonal performance in the process of assigning tone for each lexical word than the control group who have no experience of Zhuang (C−Z). The hypothesis focuses on the C+Z′ familiarity of tone split which is a common feature of the tonal system in Tai languages as their L1 positive transfer. The tone split patterns of their L1 and L2 were explored and contrasted in the comparative Gedney’s tone box. The C+Z and the C−Z were asked to pronounce 60 words of two wordlists, one of which contained Zhuang-Thai cognates to stimulate the familiarity of their L1 tone split pattern. The findings show that Thai tonal confusion patterns in the two groups present differently. The accuracy rate of the C+Z is significantly higher than that of the C−Z overall and especially in T3 and T5. Their confusion rate on the Zhuang-Thai cognate wordlist was not higher than the non-cognate wordlist. All of the aforementioned indicates the positive transfer of the L1 Zhuang in the students’ Thai L2 tonal acquisition.

A Saliency-Based Patch Sampling Approach for Deep Artistic Media Recognition

We present a saliency-based patch sampling strategy for recognizing artistic media from artwork images using a deep media recognition model, which is composed of several deep convolutional neural network-based recognition modules. The decisions from the individual modules are merged into the final decision of the model. To sample a suitable patch for the input of the module, we devise a strategy that samples patches with high probabilities of containing distinctive media stroke patterns for artistic media without distortion, as media stroke patterns are key for media recognition. We design this strategy by collecting human-selected ground truth patches and analyzing the distribution of the saliency values of the patches. From this analysis, we build a strategy that samples patches that have a high probability of containing media stroke patterns. We prove that our strategy shows best performance among the existing patch sampling strategies and that our strategy shows a consistent recognition and confusion pattern with the existing strategies.