1 research outputs found
Judging Time-to-Passage of looming sounds: evidence for the use of distance-based information
Perceptual judgments are an essential mechanism for our everyday interaction with other
moving agents or events. For instance, estimation of the time remaining before an object
contacts or passes us is essential to act upon or to avoid that object. Previous studies have
demonstrated that participants use different cues to estimate the time to contact or the time
to passage of approaching visual stimuli. Despite the considerable number of studies on the
judgment of approaching auditory stimuli, not much is known about the cues that guide listeners’
performance in an auditory Time-to-Passage (TTP) task. The present study evaluates
how accurately participants judge approaching white-noise stimuli in a TTP task that
included variable occlusion periods (portion of the presentation time where the stimulus is
not audible). Results showed that participants were able to accurately estimate TTP and
their performance, in general, was weakly affected by occlusion periods. Moreover, we
looked into the psychoacoustic variables provided by the stimuli and analysed how binaural
cues related with the performance obtained in the psychophysical task. The binaural temporal
difference seems to be the psychoacoustic cue guiding participants’ performance for
lower amounts of occlusion, while the binaural loudness difference seems to be the cue
guiding performance for higher amounts of occlusion. These results allowed us to explain
the perceptual strategies used by participants in a TTP task (maintaining accuracy by shifting
the informative cue for TTP estimation), and to demonstrate that the psychoacoustic cue
guiding listeners’ performance changes according to the occlusion period.This study was supported by: Bial FoundationGrant 143/14 (https://www.bial.com/en/bial_foundation.11/11th_symposium.219/ fellows_preliminary_results.235/fellows_ preliminary_results.a569.html); FCT PTDC/EEAELC/112137/2009 (https://www.fct.pt/apoios/projectos/consulta/vglobal_projecto?idProjecto=112137&idElemConcurso=3628); and COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio