Human hearing relies on real-world sound statistics for physical inference, study finds
McDermott's team showed that 'lesioning' a generative model of surface resonance impairs people's ability to infer object weight from sound, with the worst performance on impact sounds least likely under the full model, suggesting the brain uses real-world acoustic statistics to constrain physical inference.
2026-11-10 ~ 2026-11-10 · 2 related posts
- Episode 1: MIT PNAS paper: humans infer physical properties from impact sounds using internalized object acoustics(2026-11-10, 8 posts)
- Episode 2: MIT measures impulse responses of hundreds of everyday objects(2026-11-10, 2 posts)
- Episode 3: Generative model samples realistic impact sounds from measured object acoustics(2026-11-10, 2 posts)
- Episode 4: Human hearing relies on real-world sound statistics for physical inference, study finds(2026-11-10, 2 posts)
- Episode 5: MIT releases decade-long project's impact-sound data and models(2026-11-10, 2 posts)
- Lesioned generative models hurt human mass discrimination only across surfaces — JoshHMcDermott · 2026-11-10
- Lowest-likelihood impact sounds produce the largest impairment in physical inference — JoshHMcDermott · 2026-11-10