Investigations on heuristics governing global Soundscape evaluations
Final Report Abstract
Listening to our acoustic environment takes time. One way a sound “persists” through time is when it is perceived and remembered by listeners. Any expressed evaluation of an acoustic environment necessarily makes use of retrospection, whether we are still in the environment or remembering one from our childhood. The influence of cognitive processes, especially memory representations of a temporal experience, may lead to a weighting of certain episodes in the course of an overall retrospective evaluation. Previous research in the field of decision-making psychology has shown that momentary (i.e. “in-the-moment”) judgments of time-varying experiences do not always match retrospective judgments Thus, aim of the research project was to investigate the influence of temporal dynamics on soundscape evaluations, in particular the influence of heuristics such as the so-called peakend rule which states that overall judgments can be explained only by the combination of the most extreme moment (peak) experienced during the episode and the end. Furthermore, I investigated the influence of the (linear) trend of a temporal event on its overall judgment. The linear trend is known to evoke expectations in a person how an experience might go on in the future and therefore to provide a “look into the future”. Within the one-year project, I performed two studies: One laboratory study investigating environmental sounds of shorter durations (<90s), and one field study exploring soundscapes experienced by listeners over the course of seven days. 49 listeners took part in the laboratory experiment comparing momentary and retrospective pleasantness judgments of 17 different environmental sounds. The results reveal that retrospective judgments can be explained by the average of the momentary judgments and the linear trend of the temporal experience. The unweighted combination of peak and end, in contrast, did not receive support. For the field study, I used the so-called Experience Sampling Method (ESM). ESM refers to a method of data collection in which people periodically make momentary judgments over the course of the day while naturally acting within their everyday environment. This means that reactions to environmental sounds are captured as they occur. In the course of the study, 26 participants were prompted 10 times a day by a smartphone application. They were asked to evaluate their soundscape and report on further potential influencing factors (e.g. mood, activity at-hand, and the degree of attention paid to the soundscape). Additionally, they performed summary retrospective judgments at the end of each day and the whole week. Results support the findings obtained in the lab and reveal that daily retrospective judgments of soundscape pleasantness can be predicted by the average and the linear trend of the momentary judgments. Additionally, the negative peak and the person's mood while performing the judgment were shown to be significant predictors. Comparing both studies and time scales (minutes <-> hours), it can be stated that soundscape judgments become more heuristic when people have to judge experiences over greater time spans which can hardly be memorized and recalled completely. One factor consistently occurring in both studies is the trend effect. This factor highlights the importance of expectations in the course of sound evaluations, obviously independent from the investigated time-scale. The empirical work finally shows that – in particular under reallife conditions – people do not judge their acoustic environment in a straight-forward way which again may have implications on noise measurement regulations.
Publications
- (2014). Looking back by looking into the future – The role of anticipation and trend effects in retrospective judgments of musical excitement. In Proceedings of the Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, New York City
Steffens, J., & Guastavino, C.
- (2015). New Insights into Soundscape Evaluations Using the Experience Sampling Method. In EAA (Ed.), Proceedings of Euronoise 2015, Maastricht. CD-ROM
Steffens, J., Steele, D., & Guastavino, C.
- (2015). Trend Effects in Momentary and Retrospective Soundscape Judgements. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, Volume 101, Number 4, July/August 2015, pp. 713-722(10)
Steffens, J., & Guastavino, C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3813/AAA.918867)
