Set Of Auditory Stimuli Research Articles

Validating an emerging tool based on auditory scale for decoding users’ emotional desires

More and more businesses are realizing the vital role of emotions in heightening the attractiveness and adding value to products. Due to the perceptual differences between designers and users, it is a key challenge for designers to transfer a user’s emotional desires into technical and design specifications, particularly cultural differences that may lead to ambiguous responses. We conducted research on revealing intangible emotions via quantifiable method, in order to bridge the discrepancy between designers’ intentions and users’ decoding. An emerging non-verbal tool was proposed, auditory parameter method (AP), which considers a set of auditory stimuli as scale to assess the emotions elicited by products. The objective was to investigate and validate whether the AP method is resistant to interference in cross-cultural and inter-ethnic application. Comparative experiments were organized in parallel with both Chinese and French participants, considering conventional verbal assessment semantic differential method (SD) as control group. The statistical results indicated that the auditory scale of AP method has slight intercultural differences in perception and interpretation.

Investigation on a Non-verbal Emotion Assessment Tool in Cross-cultural Context

Emotions elicited by the appearance and experience of a product play an important role in its market success, like functionality and usability. There has been a rapid growth in the number of studies related to the characterization of user emotions and issues concerning their measurement. Auditory Parameter Method is a non-verbal emotion assessment tool, which considers a set of auditory stimuli as generic scale. In order to investigate the robustness of this tool in cross-cultural context, a comparative experiment is conducted with Chinese and French participants on the same product samples (eyeglass frames). The statistical results indicate that there are limited intercultural differences in the perception of the proposed auditory stimuli, and the design evaluations are similar for both groups. This empirical study proves that the Auditory Parameter Method is stable and reliable in a cross-cultural context because of its property of language independence.

Discrete cortical representations and their stability in the presence of synaptic turnover

Population imaging in mouse auditory cortex revealed clustering of neural responses to brief complex sounds: the activity of a local population typically falls close to one out of a small number of observed states [1]. These clusters appear to group sets of auditory stimuli into a discrete set of activity patterns and could thereby form the basis for representations of sound categories. However, to be useful for the brain, such representations should be robust against fluctuations in the underlying circuitry, which are significant even in the absences of any explicit learning paradigm [2]. Here we introduce a novel firing rate based circuit model of mouse auditory cortex to study the emergence of the observed activity cluster states and their structural stability in the presence of synaptic noise. We find that generic random networks by virtue of their inhibitory recurrent connectivity can group complex sounds spontaneously into essentially discrete sets of activity states. Moreover, these states can display high degrees of stability, even when modifying a substantial fraction of synaptic connections, as long as the basic statistics of connectivity is maintained. We use the insights gained from the analysis of our model to interpret data gathered in a parallel effort, employing chronic two-photon imaging of population activity in the auditory cortex of awake mice.

Effect of Auditory Stimuli on the Human Body Biomechanical Stability during Gait Cycle

Biomechanical stability of the human body during a gait cycle is an important parameter of biomedical assessments in the rehabilitation / recovery of people who have suffered an injury or to improve athletic performance. During the recovery actions or increasing in performance activities, can result a number of audio-visual stimuli, which may change accordingly, positively or negatively, specific actions on dedicated procedures. The research presented in this paper aims at assessing the impact of a set of auditory stimuli with negative emotional components and positive respectively, the behavior of a sample of subjects during a gait cycle. The recordings are made with afoot scansystem type "RSScan" which allows measurements of contact forces between the leg and the ground, on the entire plantar surface, measurements of the parameters during gait cycle and not least, comparative evaluation of forces, trajectories and speed changes of plantar surfaces between the left/right foot. During a gait cycle, the human subject is audio "stimulated", to track the effect of these stimulation on the biomechanical stability, on behavioral reaction of the entire human body, especially on the plantar surface which provide bipodal support. Results of this research are a starting point for specific analyzes in various biomedical or human performance situations.

Prediction, attention, and unconscious processing in hierarchical auditory perception

Prediction, attention, and unconscious processing in hierarchical auditory perception

Auditory priming of frequency and temporal information: Effects of lateralised presentation

Asymmetric distribution of function between the cerebral hemispheres has been widely investigated in the auditory modality. The current approach borrows heavily from visual local–global research in an attempt to determine whether, as in vision, local–global auditory processing is lateralised. In vision, lateralised local–global processing likely relies on spatial frequency information. Drawing analogies between visual spatial frequency and auditory dimensions, two sets of auditory stimuli were developed. In the high–low stimulus set we manipulate frequency information, and in the fast–slow stimulus set we manipulate temporal information. The fast–slow stimuli additionally mimic visual hierarchical stimulus structure, in which the arrangement of local patterns determines the global pattern. Unlike previous auditory stimuli, the current stimulus sets contain the experimental flexibility of visual local–global hierarchical stimuli allowing independent manipulation of structural levels. Previous findings of frequency and temporal range priming were replicated. Additionally, by presenting stimuli monaurally, we found that priming of frequency ranges (but not temporal ranges) was found to vary by ear, supporting the contention that the hemispheres asymmetrically retain traces of prior frequency processing. These results contribute to the extensive literature revealing cerebral asymmetries for the processing of frequency information, and extend those results to the realm of priming.

Do vegetative patients retain aspects of language comprehension? Evidence from fMRI

A diagnosis of vegetative state is made if a patient demonstrates no evidence of awareness of self or environment, no evidence of sustained, reproducible, purposeful or voluntary behavioural response to sensory stimuli and critically no evidence of language comprehension. For those patients who retain peripheral motor function, rigorous behavioural assessment is usually able to determine retained function. However, some patients do not retain the ability to respond overtly to command and it is becoming increasingly accepted that assessment of these patients should include techniques, which do not rely on any 'motor action' on the part of the patient. Here, we apply a hierarchical functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) auditory processing paradigm to determine the extent of retained language processing in a group of 14 aetiologically heterogeneous patients who met the diagnostic criteria for either the vegetative state (n = 7), the minimally conscious state (n = 5), or who were in a severely disabled condition having emerged from a minimally conscious state (n = 2). Three different levels of speech processing were assessed: (i) Low-level auditory responses were measured using a contrast between a set of auditory stimuli and a silence baseline; (ii) mid-level speech perception processing abilities were assessed by comparing intelligible speech to unintelligible noise stimuli and (iii) high-level semantic aspects of speech processing were assessed by comparing sentences that were made difficult to understand by the presence of words that were semantically ambiguous compared to matched low-ambiguity sentences. As expected the two severely disabled, but conscious patients showed preserved speech processing at all three levels. However, contrary to the diagnostic criteria defining the vegetative state, three patients (1 traumatic, 2 non-traumatic aetiology) demonstrated some evidence of preserved speech processing. The remaining four patients (1 traumatic, 3 non-traumatic aetiology) with a diagnosis of vegetative state showed no significant activation in response to sound compared with silence. These results provide further evidence that a subset of patients fulfilling the behavioural criteria for the vegetative state retain islands of preserved cognitive function.

“Soundmorphing”: A new approach to studying speech perception in humans

A problem in current studies of brain activation in speech perception is that most studies use stimuli that are sampled from different categories. This study presents a new approach in creating acoustic stimuli by filtering real words in different ways, thus this enables one to ‘morph’ the sounds gradually from something like tones to real words while preserving temporal characteristics (“soundmorphing”). This will make it possible to explore steps between tone and speech processing on a gradual scale. This study aimed to investigate more closely the network, involved in the perception of speech and the decoding of auditory (speech-)stimuli. Sets of auditory stimuli were created by dividing real words into several frequency-bands and creating a randomised rearrangement of these components. Four different sets of stimuli were used, containing 1, 2, 3 or 4 frequency bands (total range: 0–2500 Hz). Only the latter one contained intelligible words. During the fMRI session, these four trial types were presented pseudo-randomised. In all conditions, significant activations of auditory cortex were observed. The number of activated voxels and their significance increased over the four trial types. In addition, Broca's area, SMA, left thalamus, and right cerebellum were activated in the most complex and most speech-like condition. Comparing these complexes with the tone-like trials, only the left auditory cortex, left SMA, and cingulate gyrus became significant. These activations reflect the bilateral processing of the auditory stimuli, but only the left temporal areas demonstrated an increasing BOLD response with an increasing number of presented frequency components.

Reliability of bilateral differences in electrodermal activity

To evaluate the reliability of electrodermal lateralization, skin conductance response (SCR) and skin potential response (SPR) amplitudes were recorded bilaterally in 11 right-handed male students during 4 identical experimental sessions each a week apart. After a rest period of 5 min, a set of auditory stimuli (1000 Hz, 100 dB, 1 s) was delivered. Results of both recordings showed a significant lateralization for all sets of response in the majority of subjects, but the reliability of the right-left (R-L) differences was low from one session to another. However, results suggest the existence of different degrees in stability according to subjects. Otherwise, the R-L differences appear to be recording technique dependent. These results have implications for the influence of central and peripheral factors on electrodermal activity laterality.

Some auditory‐visual interactions are post‐categorical

The McGurk effect recently has been variously conjectured to be based upon a precategorical interaction or integration of information from the auditory and visual representation of the linguistic event. The conjecture of precategorical interactions, which rejects the original notion of post‐categorical interactions, may be in the form of a specialized module for speech or language, or may contribute to a logic‐decision process, either of which leads to a relatively discrete perception of speech. While not disputing such precategorical interactions for language, the research to be described demonstrates post‐categorical interaction of auditory and visual representations of phonemes. The stimuli are nonword CVC syllables. The set of auditory stimuli is edited from natural speech, while the set of visual stimuli includes the orthographic representations of the auditory stimuli syllables. Evidence for interactions in identification of initial phonemes is based upon both error rates and reaction times. [Research supported in part by an NSF grant to the first author.]