The Role of a Change Heuristic in Judgments of Sound Intensity
Abstract
Leboe and Mondor (2008) demonstrated that participants will apply a change heuristic when making duration judgments. In this study we investigated whether participants would apply this same change heuristic when making judgments about the perceived intensity of a sound. In two experiments, participants were presented with two consecutive sounds on each of a series of trials and their task was to judge whether the second sound was louder or quieter than the first. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to judge sounds that increased in frequency as louder in intensity than sounds that maintained a constant frequency. In Experiment 2, participants were more likely to judge sounds that either increased or decreased in frequency as louder in intensity than sounds that maintained a constant frequency. We interpret these results as evidence that reliance on a change heuristic leads to the illusion of increased intensity.
References
2004). Adobe audition 1.5. San Jose, CA.
(1864). On the history of the principle of the conservation of energy. London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 27, 56–64.
(1933). Loudness, its definition, measurement and calculation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 5, 82–108.
(1988). The distinction between integral and separable dimensions: Evidence for the integrality of pitch and loudness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 117, 347–370.
(2003). Acoustics-normal equal-loudness-level contours. ISO 226:2003.
(2004). Illusions of face memory: Clarity breeds familiarity. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 196–211.
(2008). The role of a change heuristic in judgments of sound duration. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 15(6), 1122–1127.
(1987). Nonspecific effects of exposure on stimuli that cannot be recognized. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 646–648.
(1989). On cross-modal similarity: The perceptual structure of pitch, loudness, and brightness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 15, 586–602.
(1998). Conceptually driven episodes create perceptual misattributions. Acta Psychologica, 98, 183–210.
(1990a). HARD and SOFT interacting dimensions: Differential effects of dual context on classification. Perception and Psychophysics, 474, 307–325.
(1990b). Perceptual primacy of dimensions: Support for a model of dimensional interaction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 398–414.
(1992). Optional processes in similarity judgments. Perception and Psychophysics, 512, 123–133.
(1999). Dynamic frequency change influences loudness perception: A central, analytic process. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1050–1059.
(2002). E-Prime software system. Pittsburg, PA.
(2004). Judgments of duration, figure-ground contrast, and size for words and nonwords. Perception and Psychophysics, 66(7), 1105–1114.
(1993). Illusions of familiarity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 1235–1253.
(1990). Illusions of immediate memory: Evidence of an attributional basis for feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 716–732.
(1985). The effect of a prior presentation on temporal judgments in a perceptual identification task. Memory and Cognition, 13, 101–111.
(