Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP)

Title:  Changing the Channel

Speaker(s): Elizabeth Strickland, Professor, SLHS

Date: Aug 29, 2019
Time: 10:30 – 11:20 am
Location: LYLE 1150

Abstract:

This past summer there was a Knowles Symposium in honor of Dave Green, a giant in the field of psychoacoustics. I will give the talk I gave at that symposium, and also share some details about the symposium. Below is my abstract for the symposium.

A great deal of early psychoacoustic research focused on the importance of a critical band, which might reflect a single channel in the auditory system. A surprising finding by Green and colleagues in the 1980s was that performance on intensity discrimination tasks improved if components were added which should be well outside the critical band. This type of task was called “profile analysis”, and showed that listeners seemed to be comparing information across channels to make decisions. In one of the early papers on profile analysis [Green, Mason, and Kidd; JASA 75, 1163-1167, 1984] Green and colleagues found that thresholds improved with duration of the profile. One hypothesis that they explored was the idea that the system had some type of “automatic gain control” that took about 50 ms to activate. Although this hypothesis did not seem to fit the data pattern in that paper, the idea of gain adjustment within a channel in response to sound has since received considerable attention. This talk will review evidence for within-channel gain adjustment.

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The working schedule for this semester will be updated here shortly (currently shows info from Spring):

https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

The titles and abstracts of the talks will be updated here:

https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts