The perception of complex, naturally occurring, nonspeech auditory stimuli: Walking perception
Xiao-Feng Li, Robert J. Logan, Richard E. Pastore · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1990
The act of walking across a hard surface by humans imposes a nonarbitrary structure on an acoustic waveform. This research investigated the sensitivity of listeners to this structure and evaluated the ability of listeners to extract certain information about the source of the sound. Three experiments were conducted. In experiment 1, stimuli produced by eight walkers (four male and four female) were presented to listeners in an AX (same/different) walker discrimination task. Experiment 2 evaluated listeners' ability to label the walkers by gender. Finally, experiment 3 assessed the ability to identify the individual walkers. The results suggested that the listeners could discriminate between the walkers and that listeners can recover some of the physical characteristics of the source based on the auditory signal.