[From Bill Powers (931115.1130 MST)]
Bruce Nevin (931115.0825) --
Thanks for the info about the formants; I noticed that, too. As
to what happens when the voice fundamental is above the formants,
this is truly a puzzle if we believe that the formants contain
the raw material of the perceptions. On the other hand, I have
never found sopranos to be particularly intelligible. You can
understand them if you know what the words are supposed to be,
but then the perception is mostly imagination.
I've applied for Developer status with Creative Labs, who make
the SoundBlaster boards. While that process grinds slowly along,
I'm working on a different project. I'll probably start up on the
speech stuff again around January.
ยทยทยท
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The vestibulo-optical reflex is truly open loop. If you fixate on
a letter on the screen and turn your head from side to side,
you'll see some apparent motion in the visual field even though
your eye doesn't lose its fixation. This, I think, is evidence of
incorrect position-disturbing signals coming from the VOR and
being interpreted as visual movements.
As to Gary Cziko's question, the existence of eye position
control in the dark is somewhat ambiguous. Wayne Hershberger, or
perhaps Martin Taylor, could tell you more (I've sent my
reference materials to Wolfgang Zocher, who is doing some eye-
control modeling).
Disturbances HAVE been applied to the eyes. The method is
gruesome. You put a large contact lens on the eye with a stalk on
it (sometimes applying a vacuum), and pull on the stalk with a
thread. In the light, the reported subjective experience is
unsettling. The visual scene, to which your eyes remain locked,
seems to swivel around your head opposite to the direction of
pull, at times to the point where it feels as if your eyes are
looking straight behind you, through your head! I don't recall
what the experience is in the dark, but I seem to remember that
there is weak resistance, about what could be accounted for by
the passive stretching of muscles and sclera. There is still
uncertainty, as far as I know, about the existence of stretch
receptors in the eye muscles. The reports I've seen have been
ambiguous.
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Martin Taylor (931115.1040)
Rick Marken (931114.1600) --
RE: Information about the disturbance
Repeating myself, I remind you that we have agreed to distinguish
between "disturbance" (an external variable that contributes to
the state of the CEV via some physical link) and "fluctuation"
(the actual change in the CEV regardless of its cause). A large
disturbance can exist with almost no corresponding fluctuation in
the CEV, provided that the output of the control system is having
an equal and opposite effect on the CEV. Identically the same
fluctuation can result from many different combinations of single
or multiple disturbances with the same or different outputs.
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Martin Taylor (personal communication). The "new new" disk is the
one with the full-sized label on it. From your description, I
would guess that someone tampered with the previous disk.
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Gavan Lintern (931115.1054) --
(copy direct)
A better contrast may be to suggest that where HPCT uses
control, dynamical systems theory sees a balance of forces.
Most in dynamical systems theory do not think much about human
behavior, but the ecological perspective extends dynamical
systems theory into a theoretical perspective on human behavior
that rejects the centrality of control.
The "balance of forces" approach is what we refer to as "open-
loop" analysis. The critical question is what happens when an
independent disturbance, itself insensible by the behaving
system, is applied at the point where the forces converge. If the
behaving system does not know of that extra force directly, the
resultant will simply be modified according to the amount of
extraneous force. Under the control concept, the force exerted by
the behaving system will adjust immediately to maintain the
resultant as it was before, cancelling the effect of the
disturbance. It's this phenomenon that we call control, and that
we say requires a control system to produce it.
What does the ecological perspective have to say about that
phenomenon?
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Did you ever find out whether your Adams is the one I met in O.
Hobart Mowrer's seminar in about 1958?
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Best to all,
Bill P.