Les rencontres de STMS welcome Laurie Heller from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her presentation is entitled "Human perception and recognition of environmental sounds."
A Zoom link for remote connection :
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89309353553?pwd=JS2gAomwIaYbod1bzPM48hZz83WhZm.1
Meeting ID: 893 0935 3553 - Password : 397036
Abstract:
Our sense of hearing informs us about events and environments around us. The sounds we hear are shaped by the forces, actions, objects, and substances that generate them. There is evidence that humans have explicit access to physical causal properties of sound-generating events and can implicitly use acoustic properties to organize and understand sound events. This talk reviews a series of studies showing ways in which causal properties are relevant and useful concepts. The discrimination of the causal actions of sounds, such as bouncing or dripping, is better than the discrimination of the causal objects of sounds, such as material and shape. Misidentification of sounds can help inform us about the sound recognition process and can also be used to promote cognitive reappraisal and tolerance of unpleasant sounds. Different types of causal properties undergo differential neural processing. Causal properties are relevant to synthesizing sounds that transition between sound categories, identifying spectro-temporal features supporting recognition, revealing the most rapid and accurate level of sound description, planning gestures and learning gesture-sound mappings, improving automatic classification of sound events, understanding misidentification patterns in normal and impaired hearing, sound pleasantness, and multimodal integration.
Biography:
Laurie Heller directs the Auditory Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA where she is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology. This fall, she is a visiting professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her research examines the human ability to use sound to understand events happening in the environment. Initially trained in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, she received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She held a faculty position at Brown University before coming to CMU. She created the Sound Events Database at auditorylab.org. She has published research on the auditory perception and cognitive neuroscience of sound recognition, sound event synthesis, auditory-visual interactions, auditory-gesture interactions, spatial hearing, echolocation training, signal detection in noise, sound pleasantness, misophonia, otoacoustic emissions, noise-induce hearing loss, and applications of machine learning to sound event generation and classificat