Re: AUDITORY Digest - 29 Nov 2007 to 1 Dec 2007 (#2007-273)

["Watson, Charles S." <watson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

If there is a sweepstakes underway for large n experiments, see our abstract for the New Orleans ASA meeting.  We gave a bunch of screening tests to 1000 normal-hearing undergrads and then trained 100 of the better ones on three very difficult auditory tasks (learning to identify or discriminate between complex spectral-temporal patterns).  The goal was to determine the predictors of "star" performance after significant training. In brief, the best combinations of auditory, visual and intellectual measures from the screening battery were not very good predictors (r-squared values of .3-.4 or so), whereas performance on each difficult task early in training was a very strong predictor of performance after considerable training.  Similar results have been obtained in various areas of applied psychology for decades, but this is the first such demonstration for auditory tasks, at least that we know of.  Be interested to hear if anyone else knows of related work we might have missed.  [we will put the poster up on the ASA website within a few days]

Chuck Watson
Gary Kidd


-----Original Message-----
From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of AUDITORY automatic digest system
Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2007 12:13 AM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: AUDITORY Digest - 29 Nov 2007 to 1 Dec 2007 (#2007-273)

There are 2 messages totalling 78 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. Experiments with large N (2)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date:    Sat, 1 Dec 2007 17:43:41 -0800
From:    Matt Wright <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Experiments with large N

Trevor Cox recently published the results of an online experiment
about listeners' ratings of sound files on a six-point scale ("not
horrible", "bad", "really bad", "awful", "really awful", and
"horrible").  To date he has 130,000 subjects (!) and about 1.5
million data points:

http://www.sea-acustica.es/WEB_ICA_07/fchrs/papers/ppa-09-003.pdf

Here's the website for his experiment: http://www.sound101.org

Clearly this is related to the "effect of visual stimuli on the
horribleness of awful sounds" that Kelly Fitz pointed out.

-Matt


On Jun 29, 2007, at 12:32 AM, Massimo Grassi wrote:
> So far it looks that the experiment with the largest N (513!) is
> "The role of contrasting temporal amplitude patterns in the
> perception of speech" Healy and Warren JASA but I didn't check yet
> the methodology to see whether is a between or a within subject
> design.

------------------------------

Date:    Sat, 1 Dec 2007 19:43:48 -0800
From:    Kelly Fitz <kelly_fitz@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Experiments with large N

Not only related! Just to clarify, I do not recall exactly when I
pointed this out, but whenever I did, I was certainly referring to
just this study. (There is, for example, a link to this work from my
sound morphing web page http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org/Kelly/
soundmorphing.html)

Kelly


On Dec 1, 2007, at 5:43 PM, Matt Wright wrote:

> Trevor Cox recently published the results of an online experiment
> about listeners' ratings of sound files on a six-point scale ("not
> horrible", "bad", "really bad", "awful", "really awful", and
> "horrible").  To date he has 130,000 subjects (!) and about 1.5
> million data points:
>
> http://www.sea-acustica.es/WEB_ICA_07/fchrs/papers/ppa-09-003.pdf
>
> Here's the website for his experiment: http://www.sound101.org
>
> Clearly this is related to the "effect of visual stimuli on the
> horribleness of awful sounds" that Kelly Fitz pointed out.
>
> -Matt
>
>
> On Jun 29, 2007, at 12:32 AM, Massimo Grassi wrote:
>> So far it looks that the experiment with the largest N (513!) is
>> "The role of contrasting temporal amplitude patterns in the
>> perception of speech" Healy and Warren JASA but I didn't check yet
>> the methodology to see whether is a between or a within subject
>> design.

Kelly Fitz
DSP Research Engineer, Starkey Hearing Research Center

------------------------------

End of AUDITORY Digest - 29 Nov 2007 to 1 Dec 2007 (#2007-273)
**************************************************************