'Imagine you have been abandoned in the middle of an unknown forest in the middle of a pitch-black night. What research evidence in auditory cognition and perception underpins your ability to understand the auditory environment?'

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PSY248 Auditory Perception

'Imagine you have been abandoned in the middle of an unknown forest in the middle of a pitch-black night. What research evidence in auditory cognition and perception underpins your ability to understand the auditory environment?'

I am in an unknown place and I cannot see, but I can hear at least five separate sounds.

Only a small area of the human brain is concerned with hearing. Its main aim is to help us interact with the environment and our other senses to tell us about what is going on in the world, including allowing us to localise objects and events, numerate these and interpret any change (Goldstein, 2002).

In order for us to hear something, the auditory system must first complete three processes. Step one is to deliver the sound stimulus to the receptors in the brain. The receptors then change this from pressure change into electrical signals leading to the final step, in which the electrical signals are processed to indicate qualities of the source of the sound including things such as pitch, timbre and location (Goldstein, 2002). However, when many sounds are heard at once, in takes a little more for the brain to distinguish between them all and separate them into manageable, understandable sounds. When there are many sounds emitting at the same time, they can affect each other. This is known as auditory masking. The basic principle is that if its intensity is high enough, one tone can mask, or decrease, our perception of another tone (Goldstein, 2002).

Every sound we hear is a composite, and we usually hear many of these at once. The brain is able to make sense of this through two methods, fusion and segregation. Fusion is the process of putting together elements of a single sound. Studies by Makous and Middlebrooks in 1990 found that people can localise sounds that are directly in front of them more accurately that sounds that are either behind them or off to the side (Goldstein, 2002). They also introduced tree coordinate systems to identify auditory location, being the azimuth coordinate, which specifies locations varying left or right from the listener; the elevation coordinate, which specifies locations above and below the listener; and the distance coordinate, which specifies the distance from the listener at which the sound occurred (Goldstein, 2002). Another problem identifying these is the precedence effect. Sounds reach our ears directly, from the source, but also indirectly, through reflection off other objects. However, studies by Litovsky (1999) found that we still generally perceive the sound as originating from only one location. She found that presenting participants with two speakers at different locations led to them hearing only one sound, centred between the two speakers – the fusion effect.

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Segregation is being able to tell apart sounds. The auditory system accomplishes this through the use of various cues, such as pitch, envelope and location, through the process of auditory scene analysis.

There has been a paradigm shift from post into modern day. Older studies into auditory perception were concerned with tones that weren’t generally heard in the real world. So, more modern studies have tried to be more realistic. Instead of focussing on pitch and frequency, they focus on sounds and words. (Gaver, 1988)

When we hear a sound, we usually use everyday listening to pay attention to ...

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