A Unified Theory of Psychophysical Laws in Auditory Intensity Perception

Frontiers in Psychology
Fan-Gang Zeng

Abstract

Psychophysical laws quantitatively relate perceptual magnitude to stimulus intensity. While most people have accepted Stevens's power function as the psychophysical law, few believe in Fechner's original idea using just-noticeable-differences (jnd) as a constant perceptual unit to educe psychophysical laws. Here I present a unified theory in hearing, starting with a general form of Zwislocki's loudness function (1965) to derive a general form of Brentano's law. I will arrive at a general form of the loudness-jnd relationship that unifies previous loudness-jnd theories. Specifically, the "slope," "proportional-jnd," and "equal-loudness, equal-jnd" theories, are three additive terms in the new unified theory. I will also show that the unified theory is consistent with empirical data in both acoustic and electric hearing. Without any free parameters, the unified theory uses loudness balance functions to successfully predict the jnd function in a wide range of hearing situations. The situations include loudness recruitment and its jnd functions in sensorineural hearing loss and simultaneous masking, loudness enhancement and the midlevel hump in forward and backward masking, abnormal loudness and jnd functions in cochlear implant su...Continue Reading

References

Nov 1, 1977·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·J S LimN I Durlach
Dec 1, 1992·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·C J Plack, N F Viemeister
Aug 1, 1992·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·F G Zeng, C W Turner
Mar 1, 1990·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·W S Hellman, R P Hellman
Jul 1, 1988·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·C M RankovicC L Uchiyama
Jul 1, 1988·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·N F Viemeister, S P Bacon
Mar 1, 1987·Journal of Speech and Hearing Research·R S Schlauch, C C Wier
Aug 1, 1987·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·R HellmanR Teghtsoonian
Mar 1, 1986·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·J J Zwislocki, H N Jordan
Oct 1, 1972·The Annals of Otology, Rhinology, and Laryngology·N Y Kiang, E C Moxon
Jan 1, 1971·Psychological Review·R Teghtsoonian
Nov 1, 1984·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·R P Carlyon, B C Moore
Sep 1, 1980·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·A J HoutsmaL D Braida
Oct 1, 1995·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·R S SchlauchN Lanthier
Oct 1, 1994·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·F G Zeng
Apr 1, 1994·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·R S Schlauch
Jan 1, 1993·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·J A StillmanL K Cefaratti
Feb 1, 1993·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·J H JohnsonR H Margolis
Oct 1, 1996·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·D A NelsonE Javel
Feb 26, 1999·Ear and Hearing·F G Zeng, J J Galvin
Sep 29, 1999·Neuroreport·F G Zeng, R V Shannon
Jun 2, 2001·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·W S Hellman, R P Hellman
Aug 7, 2002·Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO·Søren Buus, Mary Florentine
Mar 19, 2008·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·Daniel Oberfeld
Nov 26, 2010·Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews·Arnaud Jean Noreña
Aug 13, 2011·The American Journal of Psychology·Ehtibar N Dzhafarov, Hans Colonius
Jul 11, 2012·The American Journal of Psychology·Robert Teghtsoonian
Aug 14, 2019·Nature Neuroscience·Jose L Pardo-VazquezAlfonso Renart

❮ Previous
Next ❯

Methods Mentioned

BETA
cochlear-implant
cochlear implant

Related Concepts

Related Feeds

Auditory Perception

Auditory perception is the ability to receive and interpret information attained by the ears. Here is the latest research on factors and underlying mechanisms that influence auditory perception.

Related Papers

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
J J Zwislocki, H N Jordan
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
E ZWICKER
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology
Y C Serpanos, J S Gravel
© 2021 Meta ULC. All rights reserved