Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When attempting to correctly interpret signals from noise, many sources of noise are not random, only unwanted. Thesecan be discounted by observing cues that predict the noise and canceling or adjusting accordingly. We trained participantsto classify artificial bird calls of different pitches. Pitch was affected by the intended message or word the bird wascommunicating, as well as the size of the bird (larger birds were given lower pitch overall). Participants could hear thecall and also see an image indicating the size of the bird, allowing them to predict and counteract the effect of size, whichserved as noise when trying to interpret communication. At test, we probed many pitches and sizes outside the range oftraining stimuli, and we analyze the patterns by which participants not only compensate for noise, but extrapolate andgeneralize their compensation to new situations.