Abstract:
Other than in speech, there have been very few studies investigating the ability of humans to perceive characteristics of events based upon the sounds emitted. However, there is considerable anecdotal evidence that humans often use complex sounds to accurately perceive events in their environment. To investigate this ability, it is important to determine the extent of subjects' ability to map sounds onto certain event characteristics and then to determine the specific acoustic properties which tend to be used in this mapping process. Once this process has been determined, techniques can be developed to improve this ability. Previous research from our laboratory [X. Li, R. J. Logan, and R. E. Pastore, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 3036--3049 (1991)] indicated that subjects are able to identify walker gender based upon acoustic properties of four footsteps on a single surface. The current research investigated subjects' ability to identify specific walkers across different surfaces. Results indicated that, to varying degrees, subjects could reliably identify walkers across different surfaces and could generalize this training to a novel task. Further experiments provide a more detailed analysis of the properties of the acoustic signal which reliably map on to subjects ability to identify a specific walker.