Speech Science Forum – Adam Tierney

One assumption driving research on human perception is that different people solve the underlying computational problems in the same way. According to this assumption, the world supplies a set of constraints and statistical regularities to which humans adapt, and although some people might be better than others at detecting these patterns, the optimal strategy does not differ across individuals. This assumption, however, may not always hold. For example, for a listener who has difficulty processing a particular dimension the optimal strategy may be to direct attention away from it and towards other stimulus features. One way to test this assumption is to present people with ambiguous stimuli that can be categorized in multiple ways to see whether individuals differ in how they are perceived. In this talk I will present evidence suggesting that categorization of ambiguous sounds varies across individuals, and that these different strategies reflect an individual’s perceptual strengths and weaknesses and their history of exposure to and use of sound.