Uncertainty and response time in identifying nonspeech sounds
James A. Ballas, Martin J. Sliwinski, John Harding · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1986
The identification of short duration (< 500 ms) sounds taken from sound effects records was studied to determine if measures of causal uncertainty would be related to identification time. Twenty-five sounds were randomly presented to listeners who were instructed to respond as soon as they had a reasonable guess about the cause of the sound. Identification times averaged across listeners ranged from 921 ms for a doorbell to 5982 ms for a monkey cry. All identifications for a sound were combined, sorted for similar responses, and used to compute the uncertainty metric from information theory. For the sounds used, the uncertainty metric was significantly correlated with the log of the average response time (r = + 0.59). Correlations for individual subjects ranged from + 0.15 to + 0.71.