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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
Auditory scene analysis (ASA) is the process through which listeners parse and organize their acoustic environment into relevant auditory objects. ASA functions by exploiting natural regularities in the structure of auditory information. The current study investigates spectral envelope and its contribution to the perception of changes in pitch and loudness. Experiment 1 constructs a perceptual continuum of twelve f0- and intensity-matched vowel phonemes (i.e. a pure timbre manipulation) and reveals spectral envelope as a primary organizational dimension. The extremes of this dimension are i (as in “bee”) and Ʌ (“bun”). Experiment 2 measures the strength of the relationship between produced f0 and the previously observed phonetic-pitch continuum at three different levels of phonemic constraint. Scat performances and, to a lesser extent, recorded interviews were found to exhibit changes in accordance with the natural regularity; specifically, f0 changes were correlated with the phoneme pitch-height continuum. The more constrained case of lyrical singing did not exhibit the natural regularity. Experiment 3 investigates participant ratings of pitch and loudness as stimuli vary in f0, intensity, and the phonetic-pitch continuum. Psychophysical functions derived from the results reveal that moving from i to Ʌ is equivalent to a .38 semitone decrease in f0 and a .75 dB decrease in intensity. Experiment 4 examines the potentially functional aspect of the pitch, loudness, and spectral envelope relationship. Detection thresholds of stimuli in which all three dimensions change congruently (f0 increase, intensity increase, Ʌ to i) or incongruently (no f0 change, intensity increase, i to Ʌ) are compared using an objective version of the method of limits. Congruent changes did not provide a detection benefit over incongruent changes; however, when the contribution of phoneme change was removed, congruent changes did offer a slight detection benefit, as in previous research. While this relationship does not offer a detection benefit at threshold, there is a natural regularity for humans to produce phonemes at higher f0s according to their relative position on the pitch height continuum. Likewise, humans have a bias to detect pitch and loudness changes in phoneme sweeps in accordance with the natural regularity.
ContributorsPatten, K. Jakob (Author) / Mcbeath, Michael K (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Eric L (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur W (Committee member) / Zhou, Yi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
For many years now, researchers have documented evidence of fractal scaling in psychological time series. Explanations of fractal scaling have come from many sources but those that have gained the most traction in the literature are theories that suggest fractal scaling originates from the interactions among the multiple scales that make up behavior. Those theories, originating in the study of dynamical systems, suffer from the limitation that fractal analysis reveals only indirect evidence of multiscale interactions. Multiscale interactions must be demonstrated directly because there are many means to generate fractal properties. In two experiments, participants performed a pursuit tracking task while I recorded multiple behavioral and physiological time series. A new analytical technique, multiscale lagged regression, was introduced to capture how those many psychological time series coordinate across multiple scales and time. The results were surprising in that coordination among psychological time series tends to be oscillatory in nature, even when the series are not oscillatory themselves. Those and other results demonstrate the existence of multiscale interactions in psychological systems.
ContributorsLikens, Aaron D (Author) / Amazeen, Polemnia G (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Eric L (Committee member) / Cooke, Nancy L (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Motor-respiratory coordination is the synchronization of movement and breathing during exercise. The relation between movement and breathing can be described using relative phase, a measure of the location in the movement cycle relative to the location in the breathing cycle. Stability in that relative phase relation has been identified as important for aerobic efficiency. However, performance can be overly attracted to stable relative phases, preventing the performance or learning of more complex patterns. Little research exists on relative phase dynamics in motor-respiratory coordination, although those observations underscore the importance of learning more. In contrast, there is an extensive literature on relative phase dynamics in interlimb coordination. The accuracy and stability of different relative phases, transitions between patterns, and asymmetries between components are well understood. Theoretically, motor-respiratory and interlimb coordination may share dynamical properties that operate in their different physiological substrates. An existing model of relative phase dynamics in interlimb coordination, the Haken, Kelso, Bunz model, was used to gain an understanding of relative phase dynamics in the less-researched motor-respiratory coordination. Experiments 1 and 2 were designed to examine the interaction of frequency asymmetries between movement and breathing with relative phase and frequency, respectively. In Experiment 3, relative phase stability and transitions in motor-respiratory coordination were explored. Perceptual constraints on differences in stability were investigated in Experiment 4. Across experiments, contributions relevant to questions of coordinative variability were made using a dynamical method called cross recurrence quantification analysis. Results showed much consistency with predictions from an asymmetric extension of the Haken, Kelso, Bunz model and theoretical interpretation in the interlimb coordination literature, including phase wandering, intermittency, and an interdependence of perception and action. There were, however, notable exceptions that indicated stability can decrease with more natural frequency asymmetries and the connection of cross recurrence measures to categories of variability needs further clarification. The complex relative phase dynamics displayed in this study suggest that movement and breathing are softly-assembled by functional constraints and indicate that motor-respiratory coordination is a self-organized system.
ContributorsHessler, Eric Edward (Author) / Amazeen, Polemnia G (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Eric L (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur M. (Committee member) / Gray, Rob (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
A great deal of contemporary research argues that humans learn from experience. This research, however, rarely explicates what constitutes an experience for humans, let alone experiences that lead to deep learning for human flourishing. Experience is constituted of inner and out sensations processed in certain ways. Thus, a biologically realistic theory of learning must be based on a theory of sensation and how sense making derives from sensation. This dissertation seeks such a theory in the emerging literature on what kinds of creatures humans are and what this implies about how they learn and flourish. This literature ranges across several different disciplines, including neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and work on how affect guides cognition and action. Humans are as able to learn from experiences they have had in media as they are from experiences they have had in the real world. In either case, however, humans do not learn deeply from random experiences. They learn best from experiences that have been designed to recruit affect, help them manage their attention, and give them ways to assess the success of actions they take toward goals. Thus, teaching in the sense of experience design—a task for teachers in schools, as well as media designers and artists of all different sorts—is fundamental to human learning and flourishing. The dissertation defines flourishing in terms of the state of a human being’s allostatic load, a variable which can be measured. Since I am interested how experience designers design sensation to create sense making and sense making that can enhance human flourishing, I am interest in experience design in the arts, a domain that has traditionally been seen as an important source of insight built on sensation. I use examples from traditional and contemporary art in the dissertation. The last chapter is an extended study of the anime Attack on Titan I show how the design of Attack on Titan uses sensation to engender deep contemplation and discussion of complex political, historical, and philosophical issues. The way it achieves this goal has important implications for teaching and learning in and out of school.
ContributorsZhang, Qing (Author) / Gee, James P (Thesis advisor) / Gee, Elisabeth R (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This project investigates the gleam-glum effect, a well-replicated phonetic emotion association in which words with the [i] vowel-sound (as in “gleam”) are judged more emotionally positive than words with the [Ʌ] vowel-sound (as in “glum”). The effect is observed across different modalities and languages and is moderated by mouth movements relevant to word production. This research presents and tests an articulatory explanation for this association in three experiments. Experiment 1 supported the articulatory explanation by comparing recordings of 71 participants completing an emotional recall task and a word read-aloud task, showing that oral movements were more similar between positive emotional expressions and [i] articulation, and negative emotional expressions and [Ʌ] articulation. Experiment 2 partially supported the explanation with 98 YouTube recordings of natural speech. In Experiment 3, 149 participants judged emotions expressed by a speaker during [i] and [Ʌ] articulation. Contradicting the robust phonetic emotion association, participants judged more frequently that the speaker’s [Ʌ] articulatory movements were positive emotional expressions and [i] articulatory movements were negative emotional expressions. This is likely due to other visual emotional cues not related to oral movements and the order of word lists read by the speaker. Findings from the current project overall support an articulatory explanation for the gleam-glum effect, which has major implications for language and communication.
ContributorsYu, Shin-Phing (Author) / Mcbeath, Michael K (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur M (Committee member) / Stone, Greg O (Committee member) / Coza, Aurel (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Maintaining upright balance and postural control is a task that most individuals perform everyday with ease and without much thought. Although it may be a relatively easy task to perform, research has shown that changes in cognitive (or “attentional”) processes are reflected in the movements of sway. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the relationship between attention and posture when attention is directly or indirectly shifted away from posture. Using a dual-task paradigm, attention was shifted directly by instructing participants to prioritize the balance task (minimize sway in a unipedal stance) or prioritize the cognitive task (minimize errors in an auditory n-back task) and indirectly by changing the difficulty level of the cognitive task (0-back vs. 2-back task). Postural sway was assessed using sample entropy (SampEn), standard deviation, (SD) and sway path (SP) of trunk movements to measure the regularity, variability, and overall distance of sway travelled, respectively. Dual-task behavior was examined when participants were in a controlled (i.e., non-fatigued) state (Experiment 1), in a state of physical fatigue (Experiment 2), and in a state of mental fatigue (Experiment 3). Across all three experiments, indirectly shifting attention away from posture in the more difficult 2-back task induced less regularity (higher SampEn) and variability (smaller SD) in postural sway. Directly shifting attention away from posture, by prioritizing the cognitive task, induced less regularity (higher SampEn) and a longer path length (higher SP) in Experiment 1, however this effect was not significant for the fatigued participants in Experiments 2 and 3. Neither physical fatigue (Experiment 2) or mental fatigue (Experiment 3) negatively affected postural sway or cognitive performance. Overall, the findings from this dissertation contribute to the relationship between movement regularity and attention in posture, and that the postural behavior that emerges is sensitive to methods in which attention is manipulated (direct, indirect) and fatigue (physical, mental).
ContributorsGibbons, Cameron Todd (Author) / Amazeen, Polemnia G (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Eric L (Committee member) / Gray, Rob (Committee member) / Brewer, Gene A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
In order to perceive the heaviness of an object, one must wield it. This requires muscle activity and its resulting movements. Research has shown that muscle activity and movement combine for this perception in a manner inspired by Newton’s 2nd Law of Motion. Research in this area has relied on specific movement and muscle activity measures that often capture one moment of a lift. The current set of experiments set out to determine which measures best capture the underlying phenomena that lead to heaviness perception during a lift. In the first experiment, participants lifted stimuli with an elbow flexion lift while their muscle activity and movement were recorded. Participants reported their perceived heaviness of the stimuli as soon as they reached it, which resulted in an average decision angle of around 30-degrees. In the second and third experiments, participants the same stimuli with the same elbow flexion lift in four perturbation conditions – they experienced perturbations at 15-degrees of the lift, 30-degrees, 45-degrees, and with no perturbation. In the second experiment, participants experienced a physical perturbation and a cognitive perturbation in the third experiment. Across Experiments 2 and 3, the pattern of results suggested that the more time participants have in a lift, the more proportion correct, muscle activity, and movement measures appears like they do in the no perturbation condition. Additionally, a logistic least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression was used to determine which measures best predicted perception. Results show that the integrated electromyogram of the biceps brachii that occurs after peak acceleration (iEMG BB after pACC) and Average Acceleration, which are both measures that capture more than one point of a lift, predicted heaviness perception. A new model of heaviness perception was then developed, using these new measures. Comparing this New Model to an Original Model from Waddell et al., 2016 resulted in better prediction from the New Model – suggesting that measure that capture more of a lift better predict heaviness perception, meaning that an entire ongoing action event is important for perception.
ContributorsWaddell, Morgan Leigh (Author) / Amazeen, Eric L (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Polemnia G (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur M (Committee member) / Gray, Rob (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021