a new technique for measuring spectral shape discrimination a new technique is described for studying the ability of listeners to discriminate between sounds on the basis of spectral shape a process called auditory profile analysis the advantage of the technique is that it reduces the range of the random rove in level necessary to provide a specified limit on the performance which listeners could achieve by level detection that is by employing a detection strategy based solely on comparisons of stimulus level thresholds were measured for the just discriminable ripple a pattern of alternating intensity increments and decrements in an equal amplitude multitone reference spectrum for a group of normal hearing listeners broadband high pass and low pass filtered conditions were tested the results indicated that the thresholds obtained using the new technique were well below the lowest level achievable by level detection referred to as the level detection limit in all conditions using a 20 db random within trial rove in overall level the lowest threshold occurred for the broadband stimulus while the highest threshold was observed for the most extreme high pass filtered condition the new technique appears to be well suited for study of profile analysis in hearing impaired listeners where stimulus bandwidth and rove range are limited

estimates of effective frequency selectivity based on the detection of a tone added to complex maskers in experiment 1 the validity of parameters associated with the roex p r auditory filter shape was examined for three different types of maskers a a noise masker b a random 12 tone masker whose frequencies varied on a burst by burst basis multiple burst different mbd and c a random 12 tone masker whose frequencies were the same across bursts multiple burst same mbs first the power spectrum model of masking was used to estimate auditory filter shapes for four observers second the resulting auditory filter shapes were used in a computer simulation that provided an estimate of internal noise for each observer third relative weights across frequency were estimated for each observer and each masker type for the noise masker these analyses provided predictions and relative weights that were consistent across the three analyses for the mbd and mbs maskers there was little consistency neither the estimated internal noise nor the estimated relative weights reliably supported a single f

effect of variability in level on forward masking and on increment detection in the first of four experiments all with the same four subjects varying the level of a forward masker from interval to interval in a two interval forced choice 2ifc adaptive procedure had little effect on threshold in the second experiment the signal level was fixed and performance was measured in units of d varying the level of the forward masker again had little effect analyses of trial by trial data indicated that subjects did not vote for the interval with the higher level masker as would an energy detector performance was better on trials where the masker level in the interval with the signal was lower and was relatively independent of masker level in the nonsignal interval in the third experiment these results were replicated for a wider range of masker variability and with maskers lower in frequency than the signal in the fourth experiment the same range of variability from interval to interval was imposed on the level of the pedestal in an increment detection task results were sim

spectral shape discrimination by hearing impaired and normal hearing listeners the ability to discriminate between sounds with different spectral shapes was evaluated for normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners listeners discriminated between a standard stimulus and a signal stimulus in which half of the standard components were decreased in level and half were increased in level in one condition the standard stimulus was the sum of six equal amplitude tones equal spl and in another the standard stimulus was the sum of six tones at equal sensation levels re audiometric thresholds for individual subjects equal sl spectral weights were estimated in conditions where the amplitudes of the individual tones were perturbed slightly on every presentation sensitivity was similar in all conditions for normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners the presence of perturbation and equal sl components increased thresholds for both groups but only small differences in weighting strategy were measured between the groups depending on whether the equal spl or equal sl condition was tested the average data suggest that normal hearing listeners may rely more on the central components of the spectrum whereas hearing impaired listeners may have been more likely to use the edges however individual weighting functions were quite variable especially for the hi listeners perhaps reflecting difficulty in processing changes in spectral shape due to hearing loss differences in weighting strategy without changes in sensitivity suggest that factors other than spectral weights such as internal noise or difficulty encoding a reference stimulus also may dominate performance

the effects of amplitude perturbation and increasing numbers of components in profile analysis in a profile analysis task the effect of randomly perturbing the amplitudes of the components of multi tone stimuli was studied in two experiments in the first experiment thresholds for a signal added in phase to the central component of a standard were measured for different numbers of components in two conditions in one condition thresholds were measured in blocks for six different jagged standards and in another thresholds were measured when one of the six standards was chosen randomly on a presentation by presentation basis regardless of condition thresholds did not depend on the numbers of components and increased magnitude of perturbation increased thresholds moreover the slope relating thresholds to number of components did not increase with increasing magnitude of perturbation in the second experiment the signal consisted of an increase in amplitude of the central components and a decrease in amplitude of the outer components of the standard a stimulus type which has been shown to maximize the change in threshold with increasing number of components the amplitudes of component tones were selected randomly on a presentation by presentation basis thresholds fell with increases in the number of components but the slope relating thresholds to numbers of components did not change as the magnitude of perturbation increased the latter result contrasts with that reported by kidd et al j acoust soc am 90 1340 1354 1991

the filter monad and its applications abstract the aim of this paper is to study the filter monad and its applications in convergence spaces and probabilistic uniform spaces firstly strong l topologies are characterized by means of the construction of filter monad secondly a lax extension of filter monad to the category of binary relations is presented and some representations of convergence spaces by the lax algebras with respect to filter monad are obtained it is shown that the reflexive and unitary lax algebra of filter monad exactly is the pretopological convergence space and the reflexive and transitive lax algebra exactly is the topological and pretopological convergence space finally the separated completion monad in probabilistic uniform spaces is introduced and it proves that a probabilistic uniform space is hausdorff separated complete space if and only if it is an algebra with respect to the separated completion filter monad

variation in spectral shape discrimination weighting functions at different stimulus levels and signal strengths this study evaluated whether weights for spectral shape discrimination depend on overall stimulus level and signal strength the degree of spectral shape change between two stimuli five listeners discriminated between standard stimuli that were the sum of six equal amplitude tones and signal stimuli created by decreasing the amplitudes of three low frequency components and increasing the amplitudes of three high frequency components weighting functions were influenced by stimulus level in that the relative contribution of the low frequency decremented components to the high frequency incremented components decreased with increasing stimulus level although individual variability was present a follow up experiment suggested that the level dependence was due to greater reliance on high frequency components rather than incremented components excitation pattern analyses indicated that the level dependence is primarily but not solely driven by cochlear factors in general different signal strengths had no effect on the weighting functions when normalized but two of the five listeners showed variability in the shape of the weighting function across signal strengths results suggest that the effects of stimulus level on weighting functions and individual variability in the shapes of the weighting functions should be considered when comparing weighting functions across conditions and groups that might require different stimulus levels and signal strengths

detectability of increments and decrements in spectral profiles in auditory profile analysis the subject typically has to discriminate a standard spectrum consisting of widely spaced equal amplitude sinusoids from a comparison in which one or several components have been elevated relative to the others according to the widely accepted multichannel model however it should not matter whether the spectral shape alteration consists of incrementing or decrementing a component by a small number of decibels thus in order to investigate the generality of the hypothesized mechanism and to explore the role of pitch salience cues which might be thought to favor increments to single components two experiments comparing the detectability of intensity increments and decrements in spectral profiles were conducted in experiment 1 in which the number of components was varied from 3 to 15 within a fixed frequency range decrements to the central 800 hz component produced significantly larger thresholds than did increments experiment 2 which employed three tone complexes spanning different frequency ranges revealed that this effect is entirely due to the spectral density of the frequency components as the distance between the variable signal component and the flanking reference sinusoids decreased the increment decrement disparity became larger these effects may at least qualitatively be accounted for when peripheral excitation patterns are considered suggesting that local decrements are constrained more than increments by the excitation intruding from flanking stimulus components

perceptual weights in auditory level discrimination perceptual weights in level discrimination also called intensity discrimination were determined for 3 7 15 and 24 component tone complexes with flat spectral envelopes using a correlational paradigm each frequency component was randomly and independently perturbed in level on each presentation for the target interval frequency component levels were additionally increased by the level increment to be detected l 20 log10 p p p where p is pressure weights were calculated from the across trial correlation between the level perturbations for each frequency component and the interval chosen by the listener two conditions were investigated 1 l was equal across frequency components and 2 l increased progressively across frequency components for both conditions data for four listeners usually showed the greatest weight for the highest frequency component the two to four highest frequency components generally were most important for level discrimination the effect of increasing l

measuring decision weights in recognition experiments with multiple response alternatives comparing the correlation and multinomial logistic regression methods psychophysical reverse correlation methods allow researchers to gain insight into the perceptual representations and decision weighting strategies of individual subjects in perceptual tasks although these methods have gained momentum until recently their development was limited to experiments involving only two response categories recently two approaches for estimating decision weights in m alternative experiments have been put forward one approach extends the two category correlation method to m 2 alternatives the second uses multinomial logistic regression mlr in this article the relative merits of the two methods are discussed and the issues of convergence and statistical efficiency of the methods are evaluated quantitatively using monte carlo simulations the results indicate that for a range of values of the number of trials the estimated weighting patterns are closer to their asymptotic values for the correlation method than for the mlr method moreover for the mlr method weight estimates for different stimulus components can exhibit strong correlations making the analysis and interpretation of measured weighting patterns less straightforward than for the correlation method these and other advantages of the correlation method which include computational simplicity and a close relationship to other well established psychophysical reverse correlation methods make it an attractive tool to uncover decision strategies in m alternative experiments

completeness in probabilistic quasi uniform spaces abstract in this paper we give a kind of cauchy completeness in probabilistic quasi uniform space by using pair filters and prove that this kind of cauchy completeness is equivalent to the completeness of induced probabilistic uniform space introduced by hohle we also give a characterization of cauchy completeness by lawvere completeness then we study the completion of probabilistic quasi uniform space and show that each t 0 separated probabilistic quasi uniform space has a t 0 cauchy completion finally in probabilistic quasi metric space we study the relationship between the completeness of induced quasi uniform space and the completeness of probabilistic quasi metric space

psychometric functions for level discrimination in cochlearly impaired and normal listeners with equivalent threshold masking the purpose of this study was to determine whether the form of the psychometric functions for level discrimination also known as intensity discrimination measured in a two interval two alternative forced choice paradigm changes with hearing impairment measurements of sensitivity d as a function of delta l 20 log p delta p lp where p is pressure were obtained in six listeners with cochlear impairments five normal listeners tested in the quiet and two masked normal listeners stimuli were chosen to encompass a wide range of conditions and difference limens results show that the d is nearly proportional to delta l over the entire range of stimuli this simple relationship is not changed by cochlear impairments or masking noise these findings indicate that if the transformation from stimulus intensity to decision variable is affected by hearing impairment or masking the change affects both the mean and the standard deviation in the same manner i e the standard deviation may be proportional to the derivative of the transformation as was suggested by zwislocki and jordan j acoust soc am 79 772 780 1986 the results also lend support to the notion that delta l plotted on a logarithmic scale is an appropriate representation of level discrimination performance

categorical foundations of topology with applications to quantaloid enriched topological spaces based on ordered monads this paper uncovers the categorical basis of topology in terms of a categorical formulation of neighborhood axioms here dense subobjects lower separation axioms and regularity receive a purely categorical representation in the case of appropriate submonads of the double presheaf monad this theory is applied to quantaloid enriched topological spaces which form a common framework for many valued topology as well as for non commutative topology as an illumination of this situation two examples are given the first one is chosen from probability theory and has the following characteristics weak convergence of smooth probability measures is topological the hausdorff separation axiom is valid dirac measures form a dense subset the second example is related to operator theory and explains the topologization of spectra of non commutative c algebras

spectral weights for overall level discrimination in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss a conditional on a single stimulus coss analysis procedure b g berg j acoust soc am 86 1743 1746 1989 was used to measure the weight or relative reliance that normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners give to different frequencies in the discrimination of the overall level of a multitone complex on each trial two multitone tone complexes comprised of six octave frequencies from 250 to 8000 hz were presented to subjects the levels of the frequencies for each complex were randomly varied the listeners task was to identify the complex with the higher overall intensity level normal hearing listeners used a variety of listening strategies to perform the task showing no general preference to weight one component over another hearing impaired listeners however showed a general tendency to give greatest weight to the spectral information in the region of their hearing loss thirteen of the 14 hearing impaired listeners all of whom had a high frequency sensorineural hearing loss weighted one or more of the high frequency components in the complex the greatest

fuzzy topological spaces with conical neighborhood systems abstract for a commutative integral and meet continuous quantale q a cns space is defined to be a q topological space such that the q neighborhood system of each point is a conical q filter these spaces reduce to fuzzy t locality spaces in the case that the quantale is the unit interval endowed with a left continuous t norm t and reduce to probabilistic q topological spaces in the case that q is an mv algebra for a continuous quantale q a necessary and sufficient condition is obtained for the category of cns spaces to be simultaneously reflective and coreflective in the category of stratified q topological spaces this result provides an interesting example of the interaction between properties of the quantale q and that of q topological spaces

observer efficiency and weights in a multiple observation task a sequence of seven tones sampled from one of two distributions differing in mean frequency is presented to observers who try to report which distribution was sampled estimates are obtained of the weight or importance given to each tone as a function of its temporal position in five experiments the reliability of the information is varied by changing the variance of the distributions tones with high reliability are sampled from distributions with relatively small variance whereas tones with low reliability are sampled from distributions with relatively large variance results show that the observations are weighted more efficiently when the tones have equal rather than unequal reliability and when the most reliable tones have the greater intensity additional results show that the most intense tones often receive the greatest weight even when those tones have the least reliability

auditory intensity perception successive versus simultaneous across channel discriminations this study measures the ability of observers to compare the intensities of two stimuli occupying different frequency regions it includes three experiments each experiment having two conditions in one condition the two stimuli to be compared were presented simultaneously within each interval this condition has been called profile analysis in the other condition the two stimuli were presented successively within each interval because the overall level of the stimuli was randomized between intervals the observers were encouraged to compare the intensities of the two stimuli within each observation interval rather than between intervals the stimuli were two simple tones in experiment 1 and two tonal complexes in both experiments 2 and 3 the stimuli used in experiments 2 and 3 differed in frequency the results show that simultaneous comparisons are superior to successive comparisons for simple tones the difference in threshold is about 8 db for complexes with 10 to 11 components the difference

masker fluctuation and the masking level difference previous work suggests that for some listeners masker fluctuation may be advantageous for nos detection this study tested the hypothesis that the benefit of masker fluctuation to binaural analysis is based on the ability to take advantage of epochs of low masker energy in the fluctuating masker where the cues underlying binaural signal detection are more salient the hypothesis was evaluated using the time domain version of coss analysis derived by buus et al j acoust soc am 99 2288 2297 1996 which measures the perceptual weight applied by a listener within a relatively brief time window as a function of the masker level during the window the results indicated a dependency of signal detection on short term masker level in the nos condition but not in the noso condition this finding supports a new perspective indicating that binaural signal detection depends upon the envelope of a masker in a way that is fundamentally different from that typically associated with monaural detection

individual differences in the improvement in spectral shape discrimination due to increasing number of nonsignal tones the effect of the number of nonsignal tones on the just discriminable difference in spectral shape was evaluated for 12 naive subjects the signal was an intensity increment to the center tone of a multitone complex the tones were spaced at equal frequency ratios and except for the signal increment were equal in level the number of nonsignal tones ranged from 2 to 20 consistent with previous studies using equally spaced components group mean thresholds improved monotonically with increasing number of tones group mean thresholds improved about 8 db over the range of reference spectra employed large differences were found across subjects in overall performance and in the magnitude of the improvement with increasing number of nonsignal tones the greatest intersubject variability was observed for the stimuli composed of the fewest components it was concluded that the differences reported in the literature concerning the presence and magnitude of the improvement are due both to differences in the pr

different auditory filter bandwidth estimates based on profile analysis notched noise and hybrid tasks auditory filter bandwidths were estimated in three experiments the first experiment was a profile analysis experiment the stimuli were composed of sinusoidal components ranging in frequency from 200 to 5000 hz the standard stimulus was the sum of equal amplitude tones and the signal stimulus had a power spectrum that varied up down up down the number of components ranged from four to 60 interval by interval level randomization prevented the change in level of a single component from reliably indicating the change from standard to signal the second experiment was a notched noise experiment in which the 1000 hz tone to be detected was added to a noise with a notch arithmetically centered at 1000 hz detection thresholds were estimated both in the presence of and in the absence of level randomization in the third hybrid experiment a 1000 hz tone was to be detected and the masker was composed of equal amplitude sinusoidal components ranging in frequency from 200 to 5000 hz for this experiment thr

auditory profile analysis frequency phase and weber s law this paper reports three separate experiments on different aspects of performance in auditory profile analysis the first experiment deals with the effects of the frequency and position of an increment in a single component of a multitonal complex the general results indicate that detection of the signal is easier for components in the mid frequency range around 1000 hz independent of signal position within the complex the second experiment investigates the effects of relative phase of the individual components of the complex regardless of the number of components our results indicate that phase has very little effect even when different phases are selected for each presentation the third experiment compares the detection of an increment in intensity of a single component the traditional weber fraction experiment and conditions where additional components are present a profile experiment the detection of the increment is measured as a function of the level of the standard the single tone condition shows the usual near miss to weber s law whereas the multitone condition does not in addition threshold for the increment is better for the multitone condition than for the single tone condition for levels of the standard up to 70 db spl this last result is investigated for ten observers five of whom were experienced in profile tasks and five of whom were not using a low level standard the five experienced observers replicate the results described above the inexperienced observers show the opposite result on average they are better able to detect the increment in the single component condition

nonmonotonicity of informational masking neff and green percept psychophys 41 409 415 1987 report that the masking of single tones by random frequency multitone maskers varies nonmonotonically with number of masker components peaking at 10 50 components in this paper it is shown that such results are well predicted by a model the component relative entropy model core wherein thresholds increase linearly with the ensemble variance of masker spectra smoothed by peripheral auditory filters r a lutfi j acoust soc am 94 748 758 1993 three experiments were conducted in the first the nonmonotonic relation was replicated for 9 of 11 listeners in conditions similar to those of neff and green in the second the frequencies of masker components were fixed and the levels of components were varied randomly across presentations to simulate gaussian noise in this case the nonmonotonicity and the total amount of masking for these listeners were shown to be significantly reduced in the third experiment masked thresholds for the signal were found to vary monotonically with the frequency spacing of masker components for a fixed number of masker components large individual differences among listeners were obtained in some experimental conditions individual as well as mean thresholds were well predicted by the core model with an appropriate selection of the values of the two free parameters of the model for each listener

diagonal conditions and continuous extension theorem abstract in this paper we obtain a generalization of kowalsky diagonal condition and that of fischer diagonal condition respectively namely kowalsky diagonal condition and fischer diagonal condition we show that our fischer diagonal condition assures a complete mv algebra valued convergence space proposed in this paper is strong l topological and kowalsky diagonal condition assures a principle or pretopological complete mv algebra valued convergence space is strong l topological also as applications we give a dual form of our fischer diagonal condition and obtain a concept of regular convergence space in addition we present an extension theorem for continuous maps from a dense subspace to a regular convergence space to show that our diagonal conditions works indeed

systematically accelerated convergence of path integrals we present a new analytical method that systematically improves the convergence of path integrals of a generic n fold discretized theory using it we calculate the effective actions s p for p or 9 which lead to the same continuum amplitudes as the starting action but that converge to that continuum limit as 1 n p we checked this derived speedup in convergence by performing monte carlo simulations on several different models

auditory discrimination of force of impact the auditory discrimination of force of impact was measured for three groups of listeners using sounds synthesized according to first order equations of motion for the homogenous isotropic bar morse and ingard 1968 theoretical acoustics pp 175 191 the three groups were professional percussionists nonmusicians and individuals recruited from the general population without regard to musical background in the two interval forced choice procedure listeners chose the sound corresponding to the greater force of impact as the length of the bar varied from one presentation to the next from the equations of motion a maximum likelihood test for the task was determined to be of the form log a log f 0 where a and f are the amplitude and frequency of any one partial and 0 5 relative decision weights on log f were obtained from the trial by trial responses of listeners and compared to percussionists generally outperformed the other groups however the obtained decision weights of all listeners deviated significantly from and showed variability within groups far in excess of the variability associated with replication providing correct feedback after each trial had little effect on the decision weights the variability in these measures was comparable to that seen in studies involving the auditory discrimination of other source attributes

evaluation of simple models of auditory profile analysis using random reference spectra this article describes further study of the finding reported by green et al j acoust soc am 73 639 643 1983 and others that in certain conditions the threshold of detectability for an intensity increment to the center tone of a multitone reference spectrum decreased as the number of nonsignal tones increased that result was considered remarkable since critical band theory would predict that these nonsignal tones spaced outside the critical band containing the signal would have no effect on or at most slightly decrease within band detectability and certainly could not account for the result of improved detectability found in the study cited above recently henn and turner j acoust soc am 88 126 131 1990 were unable to replicate the result described above concluding that the phenomenon exists only in limited conditions and that it is highly individual in nature further they speculated that the most likely reason for the discrepancy between their study and previous s

spectral weights for sample discrimination as a function of overall level doherty and lutfi 1996 spectral weights for overall level discrimination in listeners with sensorineural hearing loss j acoust soc am 99 1053 1058 examined the weights assigned to individual components of a six tone complex during a sample discrimination task and reported that hearing impaired subjects gave the most weight to components in the region of their high frequency hearing loss in contrast weighting patterns varied for normal hearing subjects in the current study the same six tone complex comprised of the octave frequencies from 0 25 to 8 khz was presented to three subjects with normal hearing in high pass noise in low pass noise and in quiet at two overall levels consistent with doherty and lutfi subjects assigned more weight to the 4 khz component in the high pass noise condition but roughly equal weight to all components in the lower level quiet condition weights in the low pass noise and higher level quiet conditions however were similar to those in the high pass no

spectral peak selection in spectral shape discrimination by normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners spectral shape discrimination thresholds were measured in the presence and absence of noise to determine whether normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners rely primarily on spectral peaks in the excitation pattern when discriminating between stimuli with different spectral shapes standard stimuli were the sum of 2 4 6 8 10 20 or 30 equal amplitude tones with frequencies fixed between 200 and 4000hz signal stimuli were generated by increasing and decreasing the levels of every other standard component the function relating the spectral shape discrimination threshold to the number of components n showed an initial decrease in threshold with increasing n and then an increase in threshold when the number of components reached 10 and 6 for normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners respectively the presence of a 50 db spl hz noise led to a 1 7db increase in threshold for normal hearing listeners and a 3 5db increase for hearing impaired listeners multichannel modeling and the relatively s

informational masking with small set sizes informational masking refers to interference in the detectability of a sound or discrimination of some property of a sound beyond that which can be attributed to interactions at the auditory periphery in the current experiments the signal to be detected was a tone added to a 6 tone masker and informational masking was introduced by randomly choosing the frequencies of the tones that comprise the masker the primary question was whether small numbers of maskers could replace randomly drawn maskers without sacrificing the underlying detection schemes adopted by observers similar to the method used by wright and saberi j acoust soc am 105 1765 1775 1999 detection thresholds were measured for different masker set sizes where set size refers to the number of 6 tone maskers from which any one masker was drawn set sizes of 3 6 12 and 24 were tested as well as conditions in which the maskers were chosen at random in addition observers memory for maskers was coarsely evaluated large differences in thresholds were found across observers and across different masker sets even for set sizes of 24 the memory test suggests some recognition of maskers for some observers post hoc analysis of the data included an evaluation of the relative contribution of different frequencies using a single linear model as a base for comparison a linear model fitted to each condition was also evaluated although the data were fitted better using many rather than one linear model the reduction in quality of fit was modest this result suggests substantial consistency in decision strategies regardless of masker set size

preordered sets valued in a gl monoid let m l be a gl monoid an m valued preordered set is an l subset endowed with a reflexive and m transitive l relation it is essentially a category enriched in a quantaloid generated by m this paper presents a study of m valued preordered sets with emphasis on symmetrization and the cauchy completion the main result states that symmetrization and the cauchy completion of m valued preordered sets commute up to a natural isomorphism

a molecular description of profile analysis decision weights and internal noise systematic inefficiencies and internal noise in a spectral profile discrimination task were investigated listeners detected a 1000 hz sinusoid added in phase to the central component of a complex consisting of 11 equal intensity sinusoids parameters for a channel model that employs decision weights and internal noise were estimated with molecular psychophysical techniques maximum likelihood predictions of the model were generally within a few decibels of observed thresholds the degree to which an assumption of ideal weights leads to overestimation of internal noise was also assessed

relative weights for three different psychophysical tasks relative weights for two profile analysis and one detection task were estimated for the profile analysis bump task the standard was the sum of n equal amplitude sinusoidal components ranging in frequency from 200 to 5000 hz the signal for this task was an increment in level to the 1000 hz component of the standard the number of components n ranged from 4 to 50 for the profile analysis down up task the standard was composed of n equal amplitude tones ranging in frequency from 200 to 5000 hz the signal to be detected led to a spectrum that varied down up down up the detection task used the same standard as the profile analysis down up task but the signal to be detected was an added 1000 hz tone comparisons of the relative weights revealed that profile analysis bump and the detection of a tone added to a notched masker rely on similar processing strategies by contrast it was apparent that auditory processing in the profile analysis down up task depended on a different strategy than the other two tasks finally rough estimates of the auditory filter bandwidths suggest invariance with regard to task work supported by nih

effect of temporal position proportional variance and proportional duration on decision weights in temporal pattern discrimination two experiments investigated how listeners allocate their attention to different segments of a temporal pattern the experiments allowed a direct test of the predictions of the proportion of total duration ptd rule and the component relative entropy core model listeners had to decide whether two sequences of nine tones had the same or different temporal patterns tone duration 25 ms tone frequency 1000 hz a sequence s temporal pattern was determined by the time intervals between each tone s offset and the next tone s onset on same trials the time intervals at corresponding temporal positions in the two sequences were identical on different trials the corresponding time intervals were randomly varied listener attention to different temporal positions within a sequence was assessed by calculating the decision weights at each position the results supported the core model and were inconsistent with the ptd rule manipulating the mean of the time intervals within the sequence had no consistent ef

properties of quantum systems via diagonalization of transition amplitudes i discretization effects we analyze the method for calculation of properties of nonrelativistic quantum systems based on exact diagonalization of space discretized short time evolution operators in this paper we present a detailed analysis of the errors associated with space discretization approaches using direct diagonalization of real space discretized hamiltonians lead to polynomial errors in discretization spacing delta here we show that the method based on the diagonalization of the short time evolution operators leads to substantially smaller discretization errors vanishing exponentially with 1 delta 2 as a result the presented calculation scheme is particularly well suited for numerical studies of few body quantum systems the analytically derived discretization errors estimates are numerically shown to hold for several models in the follow up paper i vidanovic a bogojevic a balaz and a belic phys rev e 80 066706 2009 we present and analyze substantial improvements that result from the merger of this approach with the recently introduced effective action scheme for high precision calculation of short time propagation

temporal limits of level dominance in a sample discrimination task level dominance refers to the effect where attention is automatically directed to the loudest part of an auditory display in a sample discrimination task the frequencies of five 50ms tones were sampled from normal distributions with means of 1000 and 1100hz and presented sequentially with the tones alternating in intensity observers decide from which distribution the sample was drawn the informativeness of the even numbered tones d 2 was greater than the informativeness of the odd numbered tones d 1 estimates of decision weights and performance levels d show that when the more informative tones were less intense observers attended to the louder tones rather than the more informative tones this effect extends well beyond the temporal limits expected from forward masking studies

spectral weighting strategies for hearing impaired listeners measured using a correlational method spectral weighting strategies using a correlational method r a lutfi j acoust soc am 97 1333 1334 1995 v m richards and s zhu j acoust soc am 95 423 424 1994 were measured in ten listeners with sensorineural hearing loss on a sentence recognition task sentences and a spectrally matched noise were filtered into five separate adjacent spectral bands and presented to listeners at various signal to noise ratios snrs five point biserial correlations were computed between the listeners response correct or incorrect on the task and the snr in each band the stronger the correlation between performance and snr the greater that given band was weighted by the listener listeners were tested with and without hearing aids on all listeners were experienced hearing aid users results indicated that the highest spectral band 2800 11000hz received the greatest weight in both listening conditions however the weight on the highest spectral band was less when listeners performed the tas

uniform environments as a general framework for metrics and uniformities this paper puts theories of classical uniformity probabilistic uniformity hutton uniformity classical metric probabilistic metric and hutton metric into one framework by introducing the concept of uniform environment which is a functor from the category of sets to the opposite category of involutive unital quantales and involutive closed unital maps subject to certain conditions the results show that uniform environments and their transformations provide a nice framework to study relationships between various notions of uniformity in the literature

lattice valued convergence associated with cns spaces abstract in this paper in the context of meet continuous quantale we present a notion of conical topological lattice valued convergence space which provides the theory of lattice valued convergence associated with such conical neighborhood spaces

l proximities and totally bounded pointwise l uniformities in this paper we shall develop the study of connections between l quasi proximities in the sense of katsaras liu artico moresco and pointwise l quasi uniformities in the sense of shi we shall prove that there exists a one to one correspondence between l quasi proximity spaces and totally bounded pointwise l quasi uniform spaces

level discrimination of single tones in a multitone complex by normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners a conditional on a single stimulus coss analysis procedure j acoust soc am 86 1743 1746 1989 was used to estimate how well normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners selectively attend to individual spectral components of a broadband signal in a level discrimination task on each trial two multitone complexes consisting of six octave frequencies from 250 to 8000 hz were presented to listeners the levels of the individual tones were chosen independently and at random on each presentation the target tone was selected within a block of trials as the 250 1000 or 4000 hz component on each trial listeners were asked to indicate which of the two complex sounds contained the higher level target as a group normal hearing listeners exhibited greater selectivity than hearing impaired listeners to the 250 hz target while hearing impaired listeners showed greater selectivity than normal hearing listeners to the 4000 hz target which is in the region of their hearing loss both groups of listeners displayed large variability in their ability to selectively weight the 1000 hz target trial by trial analysis showed a decrease in weighting efficiency with increasing frequency for normal hearing listeners but a relatively constant weighting efficiency across frequency for hearing impaired listeners interestingly hearing impaired listeners selectively weighted the 4000 hz target which was in the region of their hearing loss more efficiently than did the normal hearing listeners

an enriched category approach to many valued topology in this paper we discuss a basic question in fuzzy set theory what is a many valued topology on a set x an answer is presented by interpreting the axioms two logical formulas for classical topological spaces in the fuzzy setting making use of the intrinsic fuzzy partial order on the fuzzy power set of x as preparation a systematic investigation of fuzzy partial orders is presented from the viewpoint of enriched category theory

spectral weights in profile listening the coss analysis suggested by berg b g berg j acoust soc am 86 1743 1746 1989 is applied to a profile listening task the listener s task is to detect an increment in the level of the middle component of an n component spectrum the overall level of the components is randomly selected from a 20 db range on each presentation thus the detection task is essentially one of detecting a change in spectral shape to implement the coss analysis a small perturbation in level is added to each component of the complex coss functions are generated from these perturbations and the spectral weight that the listener assigns to each component is estimated data are reported for n 3 5 and 11 components and for perturbations with standard deviations of 0 5 1 and 2 db the estimated weights are similar to those derived for an optimum detector namely the level at the signal component is compared with the average level of the nonsignal components this result supports the view that profile analysis invol

lattice valued spaces completions abstract the concept of a convergence space has recently been introduced and studied these spaces are related to the top level space of a lattice valued convergence space in order to consider completions cauchy spaces are defined and investigated in the present work each cauchy space possesses a completion and moreover each topological cauchy space has a topological completion completions of uniform limit spaces are also introduced

individualized estimation of the speech intelligibility index for short sentences test retest reliability the speech intelligibility index sii model was modified to allow individualized parameters these parameters included the relative weights of speech cues in five octave frequency bands ranging from 0 25 to 4 khz i e the band importance function and the transfer function that allows the sii to generate predictions on speech recognition scores a bayesian adaptive procedure the quick band importance function qbif procedure was utilized to enable efficient estimation of the sii parameters from individual listeners in two experiments the sii parameters were estimated for 30 normal hearing adults using institute of electrical and electronics engineers ieee sentences at speech levels of 55 65 and 75 db sound pressure level in experiment i and for 15 hearing impaired hi adult listeners using amplified ieee or azbio sentences in experiment ii in both experiments even without prior training the estimated model parameters showed satisfactory reliability between two runs of the qbif procedure at least one week apart for the hi listeners inter listener variability in most estimated sii parameters was larger than intra listener variability of the qbif procedure

perceptual weights for loudness judgments of six tone complexes subjects with normal hearing nh and with sensorineural hearing loss snhl judged the overall loudness of six tone complexes comprised of octave frequencies from 0 25 to 8 khz the level of each tone was selected from a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 5 db and subjects judged which of two complexes was louder overall level varied across conditions in the loudness task there was no difference in mean level across the two stimuli in the sample discrimination task the two complexes differed by an average of 5 db for both tasks perceptual weights were derived by correlating the differences in level between matched frequency tones in the complexes and the loudness decision on each trial weights obtained in the two tasks showed similar shifts from low to high frequency components with increasing overall level simulation of these experiments using a model of loudness perception moore and glasberg 2004 hear res 188 70 88 yielded predicted weights for these stimuli that were highly correlated with predicted specific loudness but not with the observed weights

decision strategies of hearing impaired listeners in spectral shape discrimination the ability to discriminate between sounds with different spectral shapes was evaluated for normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners listeners detected a 920 hz tone added in phase to a single component of a standard consisting of the sum of five tones spaced equally on a logarithmic frequency scale ranging from 200 to 4200 hz an overall level randomization of 10 db was either present or absent in one subset of conditions the no perturbation conditions the standard stimulus was the sum of equal amplitude tones in the perturbation conditions the amplitudes of the components within a stimulus were randomly altered on every presentation for both perturbation and no perturbation conditions thresholds for the detection of the 920 hz tone were measured to compare sensitivity to changes in spectral shape between normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners to assess whether hearing impaired listeners relied on different regions of the spectrum to discriminate between sounds spectral weights were estimated from the perturbed standards by correlating the listener s responses with the level differences per component across two intervals of a two alternative forced choice task results showed that hearing impaired and normal hearing listeners had similar sensitivity to changes in spectral shape on average across frequency correlation functions also were similar for both groups of listeners suggesting that as long as all components are audible and well separated in frequency hearing impaired listeners can use information across frequency as well as normal hearing listeners analysis of the individual data revealed however that normal hearing listeners may be better able to adopt optimal weighting schemes this conclusion is only tentative as differences in internal noise may need to be considered to interpret the results obtained from weighting studies between normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners

correlation coefficients and correlation ratios as estimates of observer weights in multiple observation tasks advantages of correlational methods are described for estimating the relative reliance or weight observers give to different elements of a complex display when performing auditory or visual discriminations correlational methods differ from other such methods by providing a least squares estimate of weights rather than a maximum likelihood estimate based on a presumed model the main benefit is that these methods can be generally applied in cases where the statistical properties of elements are unknown where correlations exist between elements or where it is necessary to evaluate decision models that are inherently nonlinear

relative estimates of combination weights decision criteria and internal noise based on correlation coefficients a means by which relative combination weights may be determined is described for a signal detection model in which the decision variable is a weighted linear combination of several independent normally distributed random variables xi s the first theorem presents the correlation between the binary response variables signal versus no signal and the component xi the second theorem presents a parallel result for the case that additive internal noise is present thus in psychophysical experiments the relative combination weights may be obtained by correlating the observers responses and the input random variables third three numerical methods which allow the evaluation of the relative magnitude of the decision criterion and the variance of a hypothetical additive internal noise are considered

recursive schrodinger equation approach to faster converging path integrals by recursively solving the underlying schrodinger equation we set up an efficient systematic approach for deriving analytic expressions for discretized effective actions with this we obtain discrete short time propagators for both one and many particles in arbitrary dimension to orders that have not been accessible before they can be used to substantially speed up numerical monte carlo calculations of path integrals as well as for setting up an alternative analytical approximation scheme for energy spectra density of states and other statistical properties of quantum systems

auditory profile analysis is there perceptual constancy for spectral shape for stimuli roved in frequency the ability to discriminate between two spectral shapes was investigated using a one interval two alternative forced choice procedure each stimulus consisted of seven components equally spaced on a logarithmic frequency scale frequency ratio of 1 2 between adjacent components the two spectral shapes were produced by first generating a complex each of whose components was equally loud when heard in isolation and then increasing the level of either the third or the fifth component by a certain amount to render pitch an unusable cue the center frequencies of the stimuli were randomly varied between presentations maintaining the ratio between adjacent components over a range of about three octaves 279 2074 hz the data indicate that listeners were not able to distinguish between the two types of profiles even for very large increments in level of the third and the fifth components the results suggest that there is no perceptual constancy for this type of spectral shape for stimuli roved over a sufficiently large frequency range the spectral shape cannot be perceived independently of stimulus frequency the results are related to the multi channel model applied in profile analysis tasks

molecular analysis of the effect of relative tone level on multitone pattern discrimination molecular psychophysics attempts to model the observer s response to stimuli as they vary from trial to trial the approach has gained popularity in multitone pattern discrimination studies as a means of estimating the relative reliance or decision weight listeners give to different tones in the pattern various factors affecting decision weights have been examined but one largely ignored is the relative level of tones in the pattern in the present study listeners detected a level increment in a sequence of 5 100 ms 2 0 khz tone bursts alternating in level between 40 and 80db spl the level increment was made largest on the 40 db tones yet despite this all four highly practiced listeners gave near exclusive weight to the 80 db tones the effect was the same when the tones were replaced by bursts of broadband gaussian noise alternating in level it was reduced only when the level differences were made 10db and it was entirely reversed only when the low level tones alternated with louder bursts of ga

sensitivity to changes in overall level and spectral shape an evaluation of a channel model two experiments involving level and spectral shape discrimination which test an optimal channel model developed by durlach et al j acoust soc am 80 63 72 1986 are described the model specifies how the auditory system compares and or combines intensity information in different frequency channels in the first experiment psychometric functions were obtained for the discrimination of changes in level and discrimination of changes in spectral shape for an eight tone complex sound a variety of different base spectral shapes were tested in some conditions level randomization was introduced to reduce the reliability of across interval changes in level increasing the amount of level variation degraded performance for the level discrimination task but had no effect on the shape discrimination task in all conditions sensitivity to changes in spectral shape was superior to sensitivity to changes in level consequently two models of central noise are evaluated in an attempt to explain these results one in which central noise acts prior to the formation of the likelihood ratio and one in which central noise degrades the likelihood ratio the former model is more successful in accounting for the data in a second experiment the detectability of a level increment to one component of a multitone complex was measured the frequency content of the complex was varied by systematically removing six components from a 23 component complex thresholds were measured for increments at three different signal frequencies a common trend in the data was that when there was a spectral gap directly above the signal frequency thresholds were lowest this result differs from the predictions of a simple channel model and contrasts with results presented by green and berg q j exp psychol 43a 449 458 1991

sources of variation in profile analysis i individual differences and extended training this study investigated two sources of variance in the ability to discriminate auditory profiles individual differences and extended training the goals of the study were 1 to determine the range and origins of individual differences in profile analysis and 2 to determine whether those who initially had poor sensitivity to changes in spectral shape could eventually acquire finer sensitivity profile stimuli had 11 components with equal log spacing from 200 2200 hz thresholds ranged from 1 to 25 db signal level relative to the context level across 46 listeners the correlation between spectral shape discrimination thresholds after 2000 trials and pure tone intensity discrimination thresholds was 0 36 the range of individual differences for pure tone intensity discrimination and spectral shape discrimination was about the same two groups of listeners were given extended practice on the profile task one group that showed low thresholds after an initial 2000 trials of practice and another that showed much higher initial thresholds all listeners improved during the course of the first 2000 trials of training most of the poor listeners continued to improve during 9000 trials of training individual differences in the listeners sensitivity to changes in spectral shape still existed after the extended practice

successive versus simultaneous comparison in auditory intensity discrimination the ability to discriminate between two brief sounds having identical frequency components but differing in the intensity of one or more of the components is studied the stimulus manipulations include randomizing the overall intensity of the sounds varying the number and spacing of the components and varying the interval of time between the sounds the results from the experiment in which interstimulus interval is manipulated clearly support a profile analysis mechanism that computes two rough spectral analyses stores a classification of these spectra in memory and compares the two stores this profile mechanism involves a simultaneous comparison of different components of the complex some remote from the signal frequency rather than a successive comparison of the difference in intensity at the signal frequency the simultaneous comparison process is more sensitive when the profile is composed of many components spaced over a wide frequency range

spectral weighting strategies for sentences measured by a correlational method listeners ability to understand speech in adverse listening conditions is partially due to the redundant nature of speech natural redundancies are often lost or altered when speech is filtered such as done in ai sii experiments it is important to study how listeners recognize speech when the speech signal is unfiltered and the entire broadband spectrum is present a correlational method r a lutfi j acoust soc am 97 1333 1334 1995 v m richards and s zhu j acoust soc am 95 423 424 1994 has been used to determine how listeners use spectral cues to perceive nonsense syllables when the full speech spectrum is present k a doherty and c w turner j acoust soc am 100 3769 3773 1996 c w turner et al j acoust soc am 104 1580 1585 1998 the experiments in this study measured spectral weighting strategies for more naturally occurring speech stimuli specifically sentences using a correlational method for normal hearing listeners results indicate that listeners placed the greatest weight on spectral information within bands 2 and 5 562 1113 and 2807 11 000 hz respectively spectral weighting strategies for sentences were also compared to weighting strategies for nonsense syllables measured in a previous study c w turner et al 1998 spectral weighting strategies for sentences were different from those reported for nonsense syllables

on fuzzy uniformities induced by a fuzzy metric space abstract different types of fuzzy uniformities have been introduced in the literature standing out the notions due to hutton hohle and lowen the main purpose of this paper is to study several methods to endow a fuzzy metric space x m in the sense of george and veeramani with a probabilistic uniformity and with a hutton 0 1 quasi uniformity we will show the functorial behavior of these constructions as well as its relation with respect to lowen s functors and katsaras s functors which establish a relationship between the categories of probabilistic uniformities and hutton 0 1 quasi uniformities with the category of classical uniformities respectively furthermore we also study the fuzzy topologies associated with these fuzzy uniformities

on possible cues in profile analysis identification of the incremented component the ability to identify the frequency of the incremented component in a multitone complex was assessed in two conditions both using the same 11 tone complexes fixed frequency equilog spaced random phases in the standard plus signal complex all components had equal level except one of the inner nine which was incremented in level by an in phase addition of a sinusoid of the same frequency the signal the overall level and signal position were randomly varied on each presentation in the standard absent condition the standard plus signal complex was presented first and it was followed by a single sinusoid either at the signal frequency or at that of an adjacent component below or above in the standard present condition a complex with equal level components the standard complex was also presented on each trial either before or after the standard plus signal complex in random order these two complexes were followed by the single sinusoid in both conditions the subjects had to indica

relative weights for frequency glide detection using narrowband noise narrowband noise stimuli were used to derive relative weights for detecting frequency glides in a yes no procedure one stimulus set was restricted to the duration of the glide for the second stimulus set there were fringe noise bands preceding and following the glide for both sets the center frequency of the linear glide was either fixed at 1000hz or randomly chosen on each trial from the range of 800 1200hz relative weights as a function of time were derived using a linear model and the linear classification method a ahumada j vis 2 121 131 2002 sensitivity was better for the fixed than random frequency conditions and weight patterns from the random frequency conditions were less reliable than those obtained from the fixed frequency conditions the magnitudes of the relative weights tended to be larger for the second half of the stimulus suggesting that subjects paid more attention to the later than the earlier parts of stimuli in the random frequency conditions the linear model failed to account for subjects performance unless the stimuli were expressed in terms of relative changes in frequency rather than absolute frequency

auditory discrimination of material changes in a struck clamped bar the principles of theoretical acoustics were applied to approximately reconstruct the sound pressure waveform at the ear as would be generated by an idealized struck clamped bar the result is an inharmonic sum of damped sinusoids whose individual acoustic parameters frequency intensity and decay modulus are for a fixed geometry and fixed driving force uniquely determined by the material composition of the bar in the standard 2ifc procedure listeners were asked to discriminate changes in material composition based on their perception of the acoustic waveform listener strategies for discriminating such changes were estimated by perturbing slightly the individual acoustic parameters from trial to trial and computing correlations with the listener s response cf r a lutfi and e oh j acoust soc am 95 2963 a 1994 in general the correlations reveal that listeners fail to make optimal use of the information in the acoustic waveform by tending to give undue weight for a given material change to changes in component frequency in some case the accompanying reduction in performance efficiency amounted to 80

properties of quantum systems via diagonalization of transition amplitudes ii systematic improvements of short time propagation in this paper building on a previous analysis i vidanovic a bogojevic and a belic preceding paper phys rev e 80 066705 2009 of exact diagonalization of the space discretized evolution operator for the study of properties of nonrelativistic quantum systems we present a substantial improvement to this method we apply recently introduced effective action approach for obtaining short time expansion of the propagator up to very high orders to calculate matrix elements of space discretized evolution operator this improves by many orders of magnitude previously used approximations for discretized matrix elements and allows us to numerically obtain large numbers of accurate energy eigenvalues and eigenstates using numerical diagonalization we illustrate this approach on several one and two dimensional models the quality of numerically calculated higher order eigenstates is assessed by comparison with semiclassical cumulative density of states

sample discrimination of frequency differences with distracters this study examined the effect of the type and frequency range of remote frequency distracters on sample discrimination of frequency differences sd f for baseline sd f conditions normal hearing listeners judged frequency differences between pairs of target tones drawn from gaussian frequency distributions near 2000 hz in experiment 1 the distracters were pairs of random frequency tones fixed frequency tones or noise bands with one distracter above and one below the target region three frequency separations of targets and distracters were tested none overlapping the target region effects of fixed frequency or noise band distracters were small compared to that of random frequency distracters which drove performance to near chance in experiment 2 dominance of the low frequency distracter was supported by the effects of changing distracter level by presenting only the higher or lower frequency distracter and by the pattern of weights derived from trial by trial responses performance recovered only when the lower frequency distracter was attenuated 40 50 db relative to the targets in experiment 3 all stimulus distributions were shifted 2 octaves higher in frequency the stronger influence of the distracter frequency below the target remained the results demonstrate the importance of both stimulus variability and frequency relationships in the interaction of targets and distracters for sd f

fuzzy uniform spaces in this paper we introduce the notion of fuzzy uniform spaces in section 2 we give some basic results and show how a fuzzy topology is derived from a fuzzy uniformity in sections 3 and 4 we prove that the notions which are introduced are good extensions and we prove that the category of uniform spaces is nicely injected in the category of fuzzy uniform spaces finally in section 5 we prove some basic results

the effect of onset asynchrony on relative weights in profile analysis decision weights were estimated in a profile analysis task to determine whether onset asynchronies between the signal component and the nonsignal components encourage the segregation of the signal relative to the other components the signal component onset was either synchronous or asynchronous with respect to the nonsignal components in the asynchronous conditions thresholds were higher and the decision weights were less efficient than in the synchronous conditions these data are largely consistent with a segregation hypothesis onset asynchrony encourages subjects to shift strategies from one of spectral shape discrimination toward one of intensity discrimination

decision rules of listeners in spectral shape discrimination with or without signal frequency uncertainty a correlation technique was used to assess the decision rules of three listeners in two cases of spectral shape discrimination tasks in one case the signal frequency was fixed and in the other it was randomly varied within each block of trials in order to estimate the decision rule of the listeners the experimenter superimposed random level perturbations on each frequency component upon each stimulus presentation over many trials correlation coefficients were computed between the random perturbations and the binary responses of the listeners and were expressed as a function of signal level for both the fixed and random signal cases the measured correlation functions were in reasonably good agreement with those predicted based on the likelihood ratio decision rules thus the listeners appeared to use information nearly optimally in discriminating spectral shapes this investigation demonstrated that the correlation technique can be used to reveal the decision rules for cases where the decision statistics are nonlinear functions of the observations

sample discrimination of frequency by hearing impaired and normal hearing listeners in a multiple observation sample discrimination experiment normal hearing nh and hearing impaired hi listeners heard two multitone complexes each consisting of six simultaneous tones with nominal frequencies spaced evenly on an erbn logarithmic scale between 257 and 6930hz on every trial the frequency of each tone was sampled from a normal distribution centered near its nominal frequency in one interval of a 2ifc task all tones were sampled from distributions lower in mean frequency and in the other interval from distributions higher in mean frequency listeners had to identify the latter interval decision weights were obtained from multiple regression analysis of the between interval frequency differences for each tone and listeners responses frequency difference limens an index of sensorineural resolution and decision weights for each tone were used to predict the sensitivity of different decision theoretic models results indicate that low frequency tones were given much greater perceptu