Michael J Hautus

University of Auckland · School of Psychology

The objectives of the current study were to obtain four physiological measures sensitive to stress and compare the nature of their decline after a stress task while listening to different sounds. Particular focus was placed on examining the ability of the song “Weightless”, which has been heralded as “the most relaxing song in the world,” to reduce...

Sensory scientists are commonly tasked with determining whether consumers will be able to detect changes in product formulations or ingredients. To this end, sensory panels are formed and discrimination tasks employed, of which numerous types exist. This research compares the performance of three discrimination tasks: the traditional triangle task...

The aim of the current study was to identify and compare the individual and interaction effects of varying the hydrocolloid concentration of two components (к-carrageenan beads and/or an agar-based disk) in pectin-based gels, on the perception of textural complexity. к-carrageenan beads of 1%, 2% and 4% concentration and agar of 0.3%, 1.2% and 3% w...

Background and purpose: Binaural beats are seen as a new type of 'digital-drug'. The aim of this study was to determine if binaural beats could facilitate physiological recovery from a mental stressor. Materials and methods: 92 adults were exposed five times each to a 2-min mental stressor and a subsequent 4-min rest period containing silence or...

Recent research has linked the ability to identify odours to parts of the brain that, when impaired, are associated with mental illness or disease. The link between impaired odour perception and some psychological disorders has led to the suggestion that standardised assessments probing smell be routinely adopted in the clinical environment. Odour...

Using gel based model foods with different structural inclusions, five stimuli were designed to represent a range of textural complexities. Compression tests showed structural differences between the inclusions (p < 0.05); increased perceivable textures and intensity thereof, equated to increasing textural complexity. Thirty-seven participants took...

Successful product development and marketing necessitate a study of the consumer concept of culture-specific or deep-positioned branded food. In this study, a new consumer test method was designed based on an authenticity test and used as a reference frame for the target concept without an upsetting story. The response format of this method include...

Food scientists and technologists are interested in how sensitive judges and consumers are to changes in product formulations. Numerous approaches to measuring sensitivity have developed at a rapid rate in the last 25 years, however, the evaluation and assessment of sensory tasks is still ongoing. The current study compared the efficiency of four d...

Objectives To evaluate a test of olfactory perception that uses freeze‐dried stimuli developed to rapidly release aromas capable of migrating to the olfactory mucosa retronasally. Design Validation study. Setting Psychology and Chemistry Departments. Participants Firstly, 15 participants provided data for psychometric functions. Secondly, 70 par...

Annoyance to unwanted sound differs across individuals, though why noise sensitive individuals are more reactive to noise while others are more resilient remains unanswered. The Information Processing Hypothesis posits that noise sensitive individuals are vulnerable to higher-order auditory processing deficits. The aim of this study was to test the...

A multivariate analysis is concerned with more than one dependent variable simultaneously. Models that generate event records have a privileged status in a multivariate analysis. From a model that generates event records, we may compute predictions for any dependent variable associated with those event records. However, because of the generality th...

The pairwise A‐Not A design involves two stimuli presented multiple times in a block of trials: a reference stimulus (A) and a comparison stimulus (B). The combined A‐Not A design employs A and several levels of B in a block of trials. Both designs were compared using ice tea with five levels of sucrose. Six judges were assessed for sensitivity usi...

From a model that generates event records, we may generate predictions for any dependent variable computable from those event records. In the present paper, we examined an implementation of Shimp's (1978) Associative Learner for two-alternative concurrent variable-interval variable-interval schedules in transition. In general, our Associative Learn...

Noise sensitivity (NS) is currently well described but its etiology has not been sufficiently explained. Noise sensitive individuals are more likely to attend to sound and evaluate it negatively, perceive it as annoying, have stronger emotional reactions to sound and, greater difficulty habituating to sounds. NS describes a vulnerability to negativ...

Prior research has found that known shapes and letters can be recognized from a sparse sampling of dots that mark locations on their boundaries. Further, unknown shapes that are displayed only once can be identified by a matching protocol, and here also, above-chance performance requires very few boundary markers. The present work examines whether...

Many laboratories have studied persistence of shape information, the goal being to better understand how the visual system mediates recognition of objects. Most have asked for recognition of known shapes, e.g., letters of the alphabet, or recall from an array. Recognition of known shapes requires access to long-term memory, so it is not possible to...

The auditory processing atypicalities experienced by many individuals on the autism spectrum disorder might be understood in terms of difficulties parsing the sound energy arriving at the ears into discrete auditory “objects.” Here we asked whether autistic adults are able to make use of two important spatial cues to auditory object formation – the...

Previous research has suggested that manipulations of plate size can have a direct impact on perception of food intake, measured by estimated fullness and intake. The present study, involving 570 individuals across Canada, China, Korea, and New Zealand, is the first empirical study to investigate cultural influences on perception of food portion as...

Models that generate event records have very general scope regarding the dimensions of the target behavior that we measure. From a set of predicted event records, we can generate predictions for any dependent variable that we could compute from the event records of our subjects. In this sense, models that generate event records permit us a freely m...

Introduction Common brain areas play a role in processing both personality and odor, while personality theory predicts that olfactory performance should vary according to personality traits. The Big Five model of personality is considered a gold standard measure but has yet to be directly applied in investigations linking personality and olfactory...

Discrimination tests are used in food companies to quantify small differences between products. Within the diversity of methods available, some are quicker to conduct, whereas others are more sensitive or statistically powerful. One class of methods includes the reminder tasks in which the reference product is given before tasting the actual test s...

Catania’s Operant Reserve (COR; Catania, 2005) is a computational model of operant behaviour. In COR, responding depletes the reserve while reinforcement replenishes the reserve. The replenishment to the reserve depends on the location of responses within the most recent inter-reinforcement interval. The rule that maps replenishment to the response...

Many theories have been offered to explain how the visual system registers, encodes, and recognizes the shape of an object. Some of the most influential assume that border lines and edges activate neurons in primary visual cortex, and these neurons encode the orientation, curvature, and linear extent of the shape as elemental cues. The present work...

Consumers gave graded preference responses to potato chips in a paired preference test. The graded responses were given to both the target pair under consideration and putatively identical “placebo” pairs of chips. From these data, a novel Signal Detection analysis was used. A model was developed giving a “magnitude of preference” distribution, for...

In psychophysics, the detection of sensory signals can be depicted by a psychometric function (PF)—a sigmoid function determined by the intercept (i.e., threshold) and the slope (i.e., the rate of increase of detection probability). Fitting psychometric functions is, however, unpopular in chemosensory research, particularly in olfaction. Most olfac...

Noise sensitivity (NS) may be subsumed by the environmental intolerance approach, characterized by the attribution of several multisystem symptoms to specific environmental exposures. NS increases the reactivity to noise and predicts noise annoyance. In multiple chemical sensitivity, an impairment in smell cognitive abilities with increased smell h...

Despite the historical interest in the taste of sweetness, a seemingly fundamental question has not been properly addressed. That is, whether an individual's sensitivity can be generalized across different sugars. An answer to this question has a close relevance to illuminating the sensory physiology of the gustatory system, as well as to practical...

Background: Noise sensitivity describes an individual's general reactivity to sound. It is a common trait found in many clinical populations and describes approximately 20% of the general population. Little is known about its underlying mechanisms, however. Objectives: Here we present findings from three studies designed to expose differences in...

Links between some psychological disorders and olfactory deficits are well documented, and screening tests have been developed to exploit these associations. Odors can take one of two routes to the olfactory receptors in the nasal epithelium, the orthonasal or retronasal route. This article discusses the potential use of the retronasal route to ass...

Using signal detection theory (SDT) and Thurstonian analysis, it has been possible in the food industry to make various business decisions such as reformulations and cost reductions based on the degree of consumer sensory discriminability by applying equivalence/difference testing. To achieve more efficient decision-making, it is important to inves...

An unpublished manuscript written by John Irwin and Michael Hautus circa 1994. We recently uncovered a hard-copy, collecting dust. Thinking it may contain some useful and as yet unpublished information, we scanned it.

In the food industry, overall discrimination tests are used with untrained/naïve consumer subjects to compare multiple test stimuli against a fixed reference, such as a company’s gold standard or a stimulus familiar to the consumer. Such tests are used for various objectives, including reformulation and cost reduction. Yet, studies on relative disc...

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between personality and resting heart rate variability (HRV) indices. Healthy volunteers (n=106) completed a 240-item Big Five personality inventory, the state/Trait Anxiety inventory, and a ten minute electrocardiographic recording. Time and frequency domain estimates of HRV were derived fr...

Some studies indicate that noise sensitivity is explained by negative affect, a dispositional tendency to negatively evaluate situations and the self. Individuals high in such traits may report a greater sensitivity to other sensory stimuli, such as smell, bright light and pain. However, research investigating the relationship between noise sensiti...

Sensitivity to unwanted sounds is common in general and clinical populations. Noise sensitivity refers to physiological and psychological internal states of an individual that increase the degree of reactivity to noise in general. The current study investigated the relationship between the Big Five personality dimensions and noise sensitivity using...

The Lorenz curve for assessing economic inequality depicts the relation between two cumulative distribution functions (CDFs), one for the distribution of incomes or wealth and the other for their first-moment distribution. By contrast, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for evaluating diagnostic systems depicts the relation between t...

Decision strategies used by judges to discriminate between three different food products (ice tea, yoghurt, and mayonnaise) are investigated using two standard tasks (A-Not A and 2-AFC) and their reminder equivalents (A-Not AR and 2-AFCR). Previous research with model solutions of varying complexity suggests that the strategy adopted in the A-Not A...

We tested the dual process and unequal variance signal detection models by jointly modeling recognition and source confidence ratings. The 2 approaches make unique predictions for the slope of the recognition memory zROC function for items with correct versus incorrect source decisions. The standard bivariate Gaussian version of the unequal varianc...

Auditory Scene Analysis provides a useful framework for understanding atypical auditory perception in autism. Specifically, a failure to segregate the incoming acoustic energy into distinct auditory objects might explain the aversive reaction autistic individuals have to certain auditory stimuli or environments. Previous research with non-autistic...

Noise sensitivity is present in many clinical populations, describes approximately 20% of the general population, though little is known about its underlying mechanisms. We present findings from four electrophysiological studies designed to expose possible differences in electrophysiological measures between noise sensitive and noise resistant indi...

Psychometric functions are predominately used for estimating detection thresholds in vision and audition. However, the requirement of large data quantities for fitting psychometric functions (>30 replications) reduces their suitability in olfactory studies because olfactory response data are often limited (<4 replications) due to the susceptibility...

God is regularly misconstrued in society. Many argue that a primary cause of this distortion stems from people's relationships and particularly their poor relationships with their parents. Given the prevalence of strained child-parent relationships, there is a need to examine if and to what degree parents and people's perceptions of their parents i...

Masking functions and fixed-signal functions were constructed using a narrow range of pedestal intensities for 10-ms, 1000-Hz gated tones. Data from three experiments agreed with previously reported data, clearly demonstrating negative masking and the pedestal effect. The data extend earlier findings by showing (1) the resilience of the pedestal ef...

Abstract Four sensory difference tests – A-Not A, two-alternative forced choice (2-AFC) and their reminder counterparts, A-Not A with reminder task (A-Not AR) and 2-AFC with reminder task (2-AFCR) – were applied to pairs of aqueous solutions containing different concentrations of citric acid to determine the decision strategy adopted by judges in...

Source memory zROC slopes change from below 1 to above 1 depending on which source gets the strongest learning. This effect has been attributed to memory processes, either in terms of a threshold source recollection process or changes in the variability of continuous source evidence. We propose 2 decision mechanisms that can produce the slope effec...

Atypical auditory perception is a widely recognised but poorly understood feature of autism. In the current study, we used magnetoencephalography to measure the brain responses of 10 autistic children as they listened passively to dichotic pitch stimuli, in which an illusory tone is generated by sub-millisecond inter-aural timing differences in whi...

We examined central auditory processing in typically- and atypically-developing readers. Concurrent EEG and MEG brain measurements were obtained from a group of 16 children with dyslexia aged 8-12 years, and a group of 16 age-matched children with normal reading ability. Auditory responses were elicited using 500ms duration broadband noise. These r...

Using low concentration NaCl and water stimuli, judges performed same-different tests and single stimulus discrimination tests. The data were subjected to a signal detection analysis. For single stimulus judgments, a β-criterion, dividing salt vs water is assumed for calculating d′. For the same-different method, a τ-criterion, a sensory yardstick...

Signal Detection Theory provides an approach to modelling difference test procedures that allows an estimate of the sensory difference between products to be obtained independently of the response bias and decision strategy used by the judge, and of the test procedure used to estimate that difference. The estimate of sensory difference obtained, d′...

Many psychophysical models propose chi-square random variables for the sensory evidence. This is true for the energy-detection model when Gaussian noise processes ate being discriminated. Parametric equations for the chi-square receiver operating characteristic (ROC) are presented and then the index A, equal to the area under the chi-square ROC, is...

A program for the conversion of TIFF files of scanned images for display on IBM PCs is described. The program allows line drawings from various sources to be displayed in Turbo Pascal programs. The resultant picture files can be converted on a range of monitors, and the images displayed in different colors.

The problem of deciding whether two things are the same or different in magnitude can be solved by judging one magnitude relative to the other, or by making absolute judgements about the magnitude of each. The shape of the resulting receiver operating characteristic depends on which solution is adopted. In order to obtain empirical receiver operati...

In order to evaluate the suitability of signal detection theory methods for assessing the discriminability of foods and beverages, the discriminability of two dairy milk products that differed in fat content was measured with two detection-theoretic methods: the single-interval rating method, and the same-different method. The nominal fat contents...

A technique previously unreported in the food sciences literature, the Single-Interval Adjustment Matrix (SIAM) Yes-No task, works by controlling the taster's response criterion, with the goal of producing a bias-free estimate of the absolute threshold. Absolute thresholds were estimated for sucrose in aqueous solution using the SIAM Yes-No task. O...

Signal detection theory provides an approach to modelling sensory difference tests that separates estimates of discriminability from the effect of response bias. However, assuming an incorrect decision strategy can also lead to inaccurate estimates of sensitivity, the most common index of which is d'. Using signal detection theory. Hautus, van Hout...

The performance of three different discrimination tests (A-Not A, 2-AFC, same-different) was investigated to explore the effects of varying aspects of the test protocols, such as the familiarization procedure and retasting of the reference (A), during testing on discriminability and the cognitive decision strategy used in the tests, when discrimina...

Studies of the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) for taste are reviewed and new data on its shape are presented. What evidence there is suggests that ROCs for taste conform to the normal-normal equal variance model of signal detection theory. Few ROCs for taste have been reported, probably because the large number of trials required by detect...

Judges performed over 2000 same-different tests followed by over 2000 A Not-A tests to distinguish between threshold sodium chloride solutions and purified water Fitting ROC curves to the data indicated that three out of four judges used a tau-strategy for the same-different test The hypothesis that judges might with experience start to categorize...

Over the last three decades, process control in aluminum smelters has improved significantly as it is the biggest leverage for cost and energy reduction in production and product quality improvement, as well as for meeting environmental compliance. The implementation of computerized automatic control systems two decades ago was a step change in imp...

To investigate more flexible methods for measuring overall sensory differences, the performance of three nonattribute-specified difference test methods was compared using Signal Detection Theory. A-Not A, 2-AFC, and 2-AFCR tests were performed with experienced subjects over repeated sessions. Learning effects were investigated to determine how much...

Background: Various visual studies have indicated bottom-up and top-down processing difficulties in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). If the auditory system is analogous to the visual system, then we would expect to see similar impairments in the auditory domain in bottom-up and top-down tasks. Time-shifted Dichotic Pitch (DP) (Dougherty et al., 19...

Many computer systems incorporating artificial intelligence have been introduced for use in industry to assist in making decisions and controlling processes. However, decision making in a complex industrial plant, such as an aluminium smelter, involves psychologically related factors such as intuitive reasonings, operator response characteristics,...