SIMON SOUNDS: a new paradigm for studying auditory categories
Seth A. Liber INTRODUCTION
In the area of cognition, the process of categorization is extremely important Categorization : treating discriminably different items as equivalent. Having categories helps minimize the cognitive load by preprocessing information in the environment Most categorization research has been conducted in the visual domain. Very little is known about categorization in audition. In the auditory domain, formation of sound categories is imperative to understanding speech Across domains, most categorization studies examine learning with feedback. YES/NO tasks or This or That category Learning with feedback (explicit learning) is not much like real-world categorization Infants learn categories of native language sounds without explicit instruction

SIMON SOUNDS

EQUIPMENT An off the shelf Hasbro Simon 2 game device adapted to interface via serial cable with sound perception computer hardware

EXPERIMENT

GOAL To demonstrate that players learn the association between colored lenses and sounds through play with the adapted SIMON game. STIMULI Four distinct sounds synthesized with sound development software. METHOD 1 - EXPOSURE Participants play SIMON for 1 hour. During this time they play 70 games of SIMON. 2 CATEGORIZATION TEST
100% 90% percent identfication 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% category1 category2 category3 category4
BASIC SIMON GAME The object of the game is to correctly repeat longer and longer sequences of signals. A signal consists of a flashing color lens with a simultaneously presented sound. Game Play SIMON will give the first signal (light and sound) The player must repeat what SIMON played by pressing the appropriate color lens SIMON will duplicate the first signal and add one The player duplicates these two signals, in order The game continues until the player makes an error in duplicating the SIMON sequence
PICTURE OF PARTICIPANT PLAYING SIMON
After play, participants are tested on the degree to which they mapped the sounds presented during play to the associated color lens. One stimulus is presented at a time. Participants task was to press the color lens that best fits with the sound.
RESULTS Participants were reliably able to map the sound stimuli to the color lens after exposure while playing SIMON. All of the category comparisons are significantly different from chance performance (25%) by p<0.0001. CONCLUSION In the simple case of pairing one sound with each lens, participants readily learn the associations among buttons and sounds during the course of game play.
ADAPTATION FOR RESEARCH The basic game of SIMON associates one sound with each color lens. To expand the SIMON game to accommodate categorization experiments, a SIMON SOUNDS program was created to interface with the SIMON device. Through this program, each color lens may be associated with a category of sounds consisting of any number of exemplars. Each color lens can play a variety of predetermined sounds, enabling each area to be coded as separate category SIMON is scalable from 2 to 4 categories, with any number of stimuli per category Number of stimuli presented is controlled to give participants equivalent exposure
The goal of this project was to develop a new auditory learning environment that provides less explicit feedback and allows investigation of categorical learning of sound categories.

NEXT STEP

To examine whether players learn auditory categories composed of multiple exemplars in the course of playing SIMON. Each color lens will be associated with a distribution of sounds. Each distribution will have acoustic characteristics unique from the other categories, but exemplars within the category will vary. The goal will be to examine whether listeners learn these categories in the course of SIMON play. If they do, SIMON will provide a means of investigating a number of issues in learning complex auditory categories.
Funding provided by Carnegie Mellon SURG & Donald E. (E'63) and Peggy Stitzenberg Undergraduate Research Fund | Advised by Dr. Lori L. Holt

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Can you count each kind of fruit? Add up each type of fruit below and write the number on the line.

Count the bananas!

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There are ____ bananas.

There are ____ strawberries.

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Count the apples!

There are ____ oranges.

There are ____ plums.

There are ____ apples.
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