Feature selection in human auditory perception

摘要

The human ability to organize and make sense out of complex arrays of information is the best example of flexible pattern recognition. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about the processes which underlie these organizational abilities. A model is proposed which describes the organizational rules or criteria employed by human listeners when comparing members of a set of complex sounds. The model assumes that feature selection is based on a Karhunen Loéve expansion of the low-level representations of sound samples. Theoretical and psychophysical analyses were performed on a set of sixteen complex sounds, revealing similar feature representations. It was concluded that the proposed model provides a reasonable first approximation to the organizational rules employed by listeners in a signal comparison task.