The Information in Auditory Patterns
Our remarkable ability to process information in sound is demonstrated everday as we
make sense of the complex and continuous pattern of variation in the acoustic signals we
encounter. The purpose of this project is to achieve a better
understanding of this ability through a formal analysis of the ability to discriminate
variable acoustic patterns other than speech. There are three key
elements of our approach. First, all efforts are linked by a single mathematical-
methodological framework where the information in a pattern is given precise meaning
and listener performance is evaluated relative to a common theoretical standard. Second,
the relative extent to which listeners make use of (weight) different sources of
information within patterns is determined from trial-by-trial analyses of the data from
each experiment. Third, a computational model that provides accurate predictions for
the results of many past studies [R.A. Lutfi, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 748-758 (1993)] is
recruited in the generation of specific hypotheses regarding the outcome of the proposed
experiments. These three elements are combined to achieve four specific aims: (1) to
provide a formal description of the interaction that causes variation in one acoustic
dimension to interfere with processing of information in another, (2) to test current
theories of information integration that have been proposed to account for nonadditive
effects of multiple sources of interference, (3) to identify specific pattern constraints that
aid in discrimination, and (4) to evaluate the listenerŐs ability to detect complex patterns
of statistical variation and covariation within patterns similar to those produced by real
sound sources. The results of the
proposed studies are intended further our understanding of how natural redundancies in
patterns
aid detection in noisy backgrounds, and how listeners process invariant relations among
components that define dynamic properties of patterns like those of speech and other
meaningful sounds.
Selected Publications
Lutfi, R. A. (1985). A power-law transformation predicting masking by sounds with
complex spectra. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 77, 2128-2136. *
Lutfi, R. A. (1989). Informational processing of complex sound: I. Intensity
Discrimination. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 86, 934-944. *
Lutfi, R. A. (1990a). Informational processing of complex sound: II. Cross-dimensional
analysis. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 87, 2141-2148. *
Lutfi, R. A. (1990b). How much masking is informational masking? Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, 88, 2607-2610. *
Lutfi, R. A. (1992). Informational processing of complex sound: III. Interference. Journal
of the Acoustical Society of America, 91, 3391-3401. *
Lutfi, R. A. (1993). A model of auditory pattern analysis based on component-relative-
entropy. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94, 748-758. *
Lutfi, R. A. (1994a). Discrimination of random, time-varying spectra with statistical
constraints. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 95, 1490-1500. *
Lutfi, R. A., and Doherty, K.A. (1994). The effects of component-relative entropy on the
discrimination of tone complexes. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,
96, 3443-3450. *
Lutfi, R. A., Doherty, K. A., and Oh, E. (1996). Psychometric functions for the
discrimination of spectral variance. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,
100, 2258-2265.