Browsing by Subject "perception"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Fertile Grounds in Technical and Professional Communication: Identity, Legitimacy, Power, and Workplace Practice
    (2021-06) Rosselot-Merritt, Jeremy
    This dissertation is about the nature and value of technical and professional communication (TPC) as a field of workplace practice, particularly about how perceptions of TPC among those outside the field can influence the perceived legitimacy of the field more broadly and what implications those perceptions can offer on practical, scholarly, pedagogical and programmatic levels. The dissertation is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 deals with how TPC has been characterized in academic literature over the years and how a disconnect between academic theory and workplace practice has evolved into the present. Chapter 1 also introduces four constructs—competencies, professional identity, legitimacy, and power—that become a basis for a practical model of TPC in this dissertation. Chapter 2 deals with three concepts from other disciplines that are useful in conceptualizing and studying workplaces in TPC scholarship. Next, chapter 3 begins with the practical framework for TPC and then proceeds to discuss a rhetorical basis for studying workplace phenomena in TPC and an empirical study methodology for studying extradisciplinary perceptions (those held by non-TPC professionals) of TPC. That methodology is based upon a modified grounded theory approach using semi-structured interviews and two-cycle qualitative coding. Chapter 4 presents detailed findings from the empirical study. Findings include the results of 31 interviews and eight patterns developed from analysis of interview data. Limitations of the study are discussed. Chapter 5 provides a detailed discussion of implications of empirical findings for practice, research, pedagogy and programs (both praxis-focused and academic research-focused) as well as thoughts for future consideration in scholarship.
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    Individual differences in the acquisition of the /t/-/k/ contrast: A study of adults' perception of children's speech
    (2015-05) Bernstein, Sara
    The presence of subtle but meaningful within-category sound differences has been documented in acoustic and articulatory analyses of children's speech. This study explored visual analog scaling (VAS) to measure speech perception. Productions of word-initial /t/ and /k/ were recorded from a diverse group of 63 children aged 28 to 39 months. Adult na�ve listeners rated productions on a VAS. Measures of children's vocabulary, speech perception, executive function, home language environment, and maternal education level were collected. Robustness of the /t/-/k/ contrast was derived from adult VAS ratings for each talker. Speech accuracy, based on phonetic transcriptions was calculated. Listeners differentiated transcription categories, including intermediate categories, using the VAS. Listeners had variable levels of intra-rater reliability, and set effects were present. Transcription accuracy and robustness of contrast were closely related, but robustness of contrast highlighted differences between children with high accuracy. Vocabulary measures predicted both robustness of contrast and transcribed accuracy.
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    Making Sense of Hallucination
    (2019-10) Swanson, Link
    It can seem as if philosophy of perception has discussed hallucination almost more than perception itself. What is the difference between perception and hallucination? I argue that the concepts we normally associate with the term ‘hallucination’ are more useful for understanding what perception is than the concepts we normally associate with the term ‘perception’. Instead of claiming, as most theories do, that hallucination is a special type of (failed) perception, I instead argue that perception is a special type of (successful) hallucination. I introduce a concept called ‘S-hallucination’ and argue that it more accurately describes the process that we normally call perception. I defend this concept and situate it within classic debates in philosophy of perception.
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    Perception and Processing of Pitch and Timbre in Human Cortex
    (2018-04) Allen, Emily
    Pitch and timbre are integral components of auditory perception, yet our understanding of how they interact with one another and how they are processed cortically is enigmatic. Through a series of behavioral studies, neuroimaging, and computational modeling, we investigated these attributes. First, we looked at how variations in one dimension affect our perception of the other. Next, we explored how pitch and timbre are processed in the human cortex, in both a passive listening context and in the presence of attention, using univariate and multivariate analyses. Lastly, we used encoding models to predict cortical responses to timbre using natural orchestral sounds. We found that pitch and timbre interact with each other perceptually, and that musicians and non-musicians are similarly affected by these interactions. Our fMRI studies revealed that, in both passive and active listening conditions, pitch and timbre are processed in largely overlapping regions. However, their patterns of activation are separable, suggesting their underlying circuitry within these regions is unique. Finally, we found that a five-feature, subjectively derived encoding model could predict a significant portion of the variance in the cortical responses to timbre, suggesting our processing of timbral dimensions may align with our perceptual categorizations of them. Taken together, these findings help clarify aspects of both our perception and processing of pitch and timbre.
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    Perception of multiple pitches: Sequential and simultaneous pitch relationships
    (2018-01) Graves, Jackson
    The perception of pitch, a dimension of sound that is important for music perception, speech perception, and sound source segregation, is influenced by its context, both sequential and simultaneous. In music, pitch sequences form melodic contours, and simultaneous pitches form chords and harmony. A series of experiments investigated the perception of melodic contour in pitch as well as two other auditory dimensions, brightness and loudness. The results showed that subjective ratings of continuation for brightness and loudness sequences conformed to the same general contour-based expectations as pitch sequences, suggesting that melodic expectations are not unique to the dimension of pitch. Listeners with congenital amusia, however, exhibited less impairment on a short-term memory task for loudness contours than for pitch contours, suggesting a pitch-specific deficit. In a pair of experiments, priming of a familiar tonal context improved accuracy on a pitch interval discrimination task. However, the overall benefit to performance from tonal context was small, suggesting that previously reported effects of response time may mainly reflect expectancy as opposed to perceptual accuracy. In the last series of experiments, listeners accurately identified pitches in mixtures of three concurrent complex tones, despite poor peripheral resolvability. These stimuli help to dissociate two normally confounded variables in complex pitch, harmonic number and peripheral resolvability. The results were compared with outputs from two kinds of auditory models, one based on the rate-place code for pitch and the other based on the temporal code. Overall, these findings suggest that pitch perception involves bottom-up integration of both spectral and temporal information, as well as top-down effects of learning and context.
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    Value of Curation Survey, January 2021
    (2021-08-30) Johnston, Lisa; Curty, Renata; Lafferty-Hess, Sophia; Hadley, Hannah; Petters, Jonathan; Luong, Hoa; Braxton, Susan; Carlson, Jake; Kozlowski, Wendy A; rcurty@ucsb.edu; Curty, Renata; Data Curation Network
    This dataset includes the raw and augmented survey results from the January 2021 Value of Curation survey run by the Data Curation Network. Distributed to US data repository staff and directors via email listservs the survey received a total of 120 responses. 22 responses were for non-US repositories and three did not provide a repository of reference. A majority of the participants self-identified as staff members with 52 staff and 34 repository directors. The remaining were 5 unaffiliated users, and 4 unaffiliated depositors. A third of the responses (68) were associated with certified CoreTrustSeal repositories, and 27 responses were related to members of the Data Curation Network (DCN).