APCAM 2010 Program

We are pleased to welcome you to the eighth annual Auditory Cognition, Perception, and Action Meeting (APCAM). The goal of APCAM is to bring together researchers from various theoretical perspectives to present focused research on auditory cognition, perception, and aurally guided action. APCAM is a unique meeting in its exclusive focus on the perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of audition. Many thanks to all those whose contributions have helped make APCAM such a success. We would also like to thank The 8:40 Using nonlinear stimulus-frequency OAEs (nSFOAEs) to study auditory attention 10:20 Who I am, what I say, and how I say it: The effects of talker variability on affective language. 3 Attention, predictibility and the auditory 'oddball' effect in perceived duration. 10 Neuronal mechanisms underlying retention of timbre in acoustic short-term memory. 16 Is the world the same size when I use my ears as when as I use my eyes? A test of James J. Gibson's notion of the partial equivalence of perceptual systems. The possibility that selective auditory attention can affect the processing characteristics of the cochlea via the medial olivocochlear (MOC) pathway was investigated in human listeners using a nonlinear version of the stimulus-frequency otoacoustic emission (SFOAE), called the nSFOAE (Walsh et al., 2010). The nSFOAE stimulus was a long-duration tone (4.0 kHz, 200 ms) presented simultaneously to the two ears, either in quiet (tone-alone) or in noise (tone-plus-noise), and the nSFOAE response was extracted using a cancellation procedure. The test stimulus consisted of a sequence of seven randomly-selected spoken digits that was interleaved with a sequence of six nSFOAE stimuli. The speaker was female in one ear and male in the other, and the ear that received the female speaker alternated across trials. The task of the listener was to attend to the female voice, to memorize the spoken digit string, and then to match a subset of the digit string to one of two choices presented visually on a computer screen. When nSFOAEs were measured during periods of selective attention, the tone-plus-noise responses exhibited larger maximum magnitudes, and larger deviations from the tone-alone magnitudes, compared to the responses measured during a no-attention condition, in which the competing speech streams were presented, but with no forced-choice behavioral task. The difference in the maximum magnitudes across these two conditions was about 4 – 5 dB, on average. These results suggested an enhancement of MOC inhibition during …