Academic literature on the topic 'Individual differences scaling'

Sixteen listeners (10 expert, 6 naive) judged the dissimilarity of pairs of voices drawn from pathological and normal populations. Separate nonmetric multidimensional scaling solutions were calculated for each listener and voice set. The correlations between individual listeners’ dissimilarity ratings were low However, scaling solutions indicated that each subject judged the voices in a reliable, meaningful way. Listeners differed more from one another in their judgments of the pathological voices (which varied widely on a number of acoustic parameters) than they did for the normal voices (which formed a much more homogeneous set acoustically). The acoustic features listeners used to judge dissimilarity were predictable from the characteristics of the stimulus sets’ only parameters that showed substantial variability were perceptually salient across listeners. These results are consistent with prototype models of voice perception They suggest that traditional means of assessing listener reliability n voice perception tasks may not be appropriate, and highlight the importance of using explicit comparisons between stimuli when studying voice quality perception

1. Normal subjects show wide variability in their sensory scaling of breathlessness for equivalent degrees of ventilatory stimulation and behave ‘characteristically’ irrespective of stimulus type. 2. Observed differences are not explained by physical characteristics, ventilatory sensitivity or pattern of breathing although there is a weak association with the degree of physical fitness. 3. Differences are seen when scaling is performed with reference to both rigidly defined extremes of breathlessness (visual analogue scaling) and a subject's own relative changes in the intensity of this sensation (magnitude estimation). 4. These findings may explain the common observation, in patients with respiratory disease, of dyspnoea out of proportion to the pathophysiological state.