Ra. Lutfi, A MODEL OF AUDITORY PATTERN-ANALYSIS BASED ON COMPONENT-RELATIVE-ENTROPY, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94(2), 1993, pp. 748-758
Recently results from detection and information theory have been used
to predict performance of human observers in experiments involving the
discriminability of changes in individual components of unfamiliar or
uncertain tone patterns [R. A. Lutfi, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 91, 3391-34
01 (1992)]. In this paper, the theoretical analysis is expanded to yie
ld a general rule of pattern analysis that accounts for nearly all of
the major results of such experiments conducted over the last 18 years
. The nile can be stated as follows: Component discriminability in an
unfamiliar tone pattern (profile or sequence) is a linearly increasing
function of the component's relative entropy (CoRE) in the pattern An
cillary. The threshold for detection of a change decreases by one orde
r of magnitude (factor of 10) for each one bit increase in CoRE. This
precise relation of threshold to CoRE is demonstrated repeatedly in a
review of past studies, and is shown to account for the relative effec
ts of a variety of important variables and their interactions. Such va
riables include the total duration of the pattern; the number of tones
in the pattern; the number of tones subject to change; the relative l
evel and duration of individual tones in the pattern; the relative var
iability and the physical dimension of the tones' parameters that are
subject to change; the number and position of targets in the pattern;
the psychophysical procedure used (method of adjustment versus same-di
fferent), the type of discrimination task (frequency versus intensity
discrimination), and the manner of presentation of the tones (simultan
eous or sequential). The CoRE rule seems to reflect a general property
of auditory analysis wherein the perception of patterns in an ensembl
e is dominated by those features that dominate the variance of the ens
emble.