4.8: There’s More to Hearing, Feeling...

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Hearing

If you hear people speaking a language you don’t understand, you are unlikely to perceive breaks between many of their words; you won’t know which sounds are single words and which aren’t. Listen carefully to an English sentence spoken at a normal speed, and you’ll realize how the sounds run together. But someone who knows the language and expects to hear normal words will perceive discrete words, rather than just one long run-together sound.

Context also affects how we hear things, particularly words. The phrase ‘eye screem’ is interpreted differently in the sentences ‘I scream when someone jumps out and surprises me’ and ‘I love rocky road ice cream’.

Back in the 1960s, the rock band the Kingsmen had a smash hit with the song “Louie Louie.” It wasn’t easy to discern the words, and there were various accounts of what they were. The set on the sheet music was harmless enough, but another set, circulating widely in the teenage underground, would have kept the song off the air. It turned out that if you gave people one set of words to read before hearing the Kingsmen’s rendition, they would hear those words. But if you gave them the other set, they would hear those.

The Phoneme Restoration Effect

When people hear the following sentence:

It was found that the *eel was on the __________.

where * is a missing sound, they automatically fill the * in so that they think that they hear a normal English word. The way that they fill it in depends on what word is placed in the blank. When the following words are put into the blank underlined space

axle
shoe
orange
table

it determines what people think they hear. For example, they think they hear the word ‘wheel’ (in the axle case). What words did they think they heard in the other cases?

The * represents what linguists call a ‘phoneme’, and so this phenomenon is known as the phoneme restoration effect. It is particularly interesting because the relevant part of context (the word inserted in the blank) is yet to come when subjects filled in the missing phoneme.

If you remember the internet controversy about Yanny and Laurel, or the scene on Sesame Street when people perceived Grover to be dropping the F-bomb from a few years ago, you can see that this happens even when there isn’t audio information missing. Our minds force order onto the audio stimulus we receive. There are going to be plenty of times when there is ambiguity to the sounds, and people are going to experience them differently.

Similar points apply to other sensory modalities. Suppose that you are squeamish about bugs. You go on a camping trip, and around the campfire people swap stories about scary insects, people they know who died from spider bites, and the like. That night as you are drifting off to sleep, a blade of grass brushes against your cheek—but when you first feel it, it probably won’t feel like a harmless blade of grass. Or you may be enjoying a tasty meal—until you learn it contains some ingredient you don’t like or find disgusting (that burger tasted wonderful—until you learned that it was made from horse meat).

Feelings

Physiological States and Context

Expectations and beliefs can even influence our physiological states. In a study done in the 1970s, two psychologists had male undergraduates take a drink. Some of the drinks contained alcohol and some didn’t. Some people in each group were told that their drink contained alcohol, and some were not told this. Finally, a female assistant then walked in, sat down, looked the subject right in the eye, and begin talking to him—which made many of the subjects nervous.

We all know that nervousness affects heart rate. It turned out that subjects who thought they had been given a vodka tonic showed smaller increases in heart rate than subjects who thought they’d had only a glass of tonic. Whether the subjects really had been given alcohol didn’t affect their heart rate. But whether they thought they had been given alcohol did.

Expectations and context can exert a powerful effect on our perceptions and feelings. In some situations, they lead to a placebo effect. The placebo effect occurs when people are given a pill or a shot consisting of chemicals that won’t affect their illness or disease. If they think that it is genuine medicine, they often get better, even though they only took a sugar pill. In a later module, we will see that this effect is so powerful that experiments on the effectiveness of drugs must be designed to guard against it.