Subject: Re: 'Persistance of hearing' From: Al Bregman <bregman(at)HEBB.PSYCH.MCGILL.CA> Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 16:34:38 -0400Dear Craig, Bill, Walt, et al.: >From what I've read (although I can't give you specific references) the persistence of interpretations is a universal property of the human mind. It occurs in every aspect of perception, and in problem-solving and even in social psychology. It has been referred to as "set". In my view it results from a conservative, but very useful, tendency of schemas, once evoked, to preserve themselves in a noisy world, despite fluctuations in data. One might ask what the hearing of a timbre or a click has to do with schemas. My answer, not being a Gibsonian, is that every human experience is based on the brain's construction of a representation to "account for" the incoming data and that these representations can be of a very low order ("edge", "timbre", "pitch", "movement" "separate source") or of a high order ("friendly", "evil", "restaurant"). I think that the quality of persistence applies at all levels in this hierarchy. Without it, since each interpretation supports interpretations above and below it in the hierarchy, all experience would be very shaky. Try looking up the following on Google: "the phenomenon of set" (psychology OR perception) Best, Al --------------------------------------------- Albert S. Bregman, Emeritus Professor Psychology Dept., McGill University 1205 Docteur Penfield Avenue Montreal, Quebec Canada H3A 1B1 Office: Voice: +1 (514) 398-6103 Fax: +1 (514) 398-4896 --------------------------------------------- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Craig Nicol" <craig.nicol(at)gmail.com> To: <AUDITORY(at)LISTS.MCGILL.CA> Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 6:00 AM Subject: 'Persistance of hearing' > I've been looking at Timbre Spaces for a while, in particular the > spaces by Grey in the 1970s. In one of his papers he mentions an > experiment where two sounds are chosen (let's call them A and B), and > a set of sounds is generated morphing from A to B. What he discovered > is that there is a hysteresis effect when listening to the morphing, > i.e. If the sounds are played from A to B, the listener will report > hearing A for over half the samples whereas if the sounds are played > from B to A, the listener will report hearing B for more samples. > > I am vaguely aware of similar optical illusions such as persistence of > vision and I was wondering if anyone could direct me to more > information on this effect in hearing as I want to know if this effect > is particular to the timbre space or is a product of human perception. > > Regards, > Craig Nicol. > >