The Effect And Mechanism Of Partial Information Transmission In The Auditory Channel

A stimulus contains multiple attributes，such as pitch, intensity and acoustic phase.A basic hypothesis of information processing is that the processing consists of fivestages. And under certain circumstances, some information can be transmitted to thenext cognitive stage before the processing of other information. Meanwhile thetransmission speed of that information is influenced by its perceptual discriminability.An examination of partial information transmission is essential in improving theunderstanding of the mechanism of information processing. By manipulating twoattributes, namely, pitch and intensity, with their perceptual discriminability controlled,using a choice go/no-go paradigm, this study got the subjects nearly fifteen days of puretone training which is separated into three parts and measured their LRPs. The resultsshowed that pitch and intensity were transmitted earlier as partial information in thehigh pitch-and intensity-discrimination, respectively, as well as the continuous changesof the LRPs. Thus, this study demonstrated that the transmission speed of a certainattribute could be modulated by its perceptual discriminability that does not onlydepend on the attributes themselves. The capability of our brain makes the flexibility ofpartial information transmission in the auditory channel. Thus, when choosing the waysof information processing, our brain would not prefer those which are stuck to one kindof model, but the efficient ones.