Dr. Stephen Lakatos Auditory Perception Psychology Department Washington State University

Stephen Lakatos, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department:	Psychology
Office:	CL 208A (Classroom Building, 2nd Floor)
Perception Lab:	CL310 (Classroom Building, 3rd Floor)
Address:	Washington State University 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave. Vancouver, WA 98686
Phone Number (office):	(360) 546-9743
Phone Number (lab):	(360) 546-9472
Support Staff:	Zaida O'Connor (CL 208)
E-Mail:	lakatos@vancouver.wsu.edu

Undergraduate Research Assistants:

(click here for group photo)

Shanell Cox

Lauren Stuber

Briana Wensel

Classes:

· PSYCH 312, Experimental Methods in Psychology

· DTC 476, Electronic and Digital Music Technology - History and Practice

Education:

· B.A., Scholar of the House, Yale University, 1987.

· Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology, Stanford University, 1993.

· Post-doctoral fellowship, Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1994.

· Post-doctoral fellowship, NIH, John B. Pierce Laboratory, Yale University, 1995-96.

Research Interests:

My research lab at Washington State University studies auditory and tactile perception, as well as the crossmodal links between vision, touch, and audition. I also maintain ongoing research collaborations with Perry Cook at Princeton University, Gary Scavone at McGill University (formerly at Stanford), and Alexander Stevens at Oregon Health Sciences University. In general, my experiments seek to understand our mental representations of space and time. I believe there is a core set of basic principles that govern our perception of objects and events in our environment, and these principles can be as simple and elegant as those of physics. They generalize across the senses and can apply to different domains of psychology.

Mental Representation of Auditory Sources - This research program addresses the following question: To what extent can we encode the auditory properties of sound source by extracting certain invariant physical characteristics of their gross geometric properties from their acoustic behavior? In one the very few studies in this domain (Lakatos, McAdams, & Causse, 1997), I have examined how listeners can discriminate the geometric shapes of simple resonating bodies such as steel and wooden bars, with the future aim of characterizing more complex acoustic sources. Listeners' performance in such tasks varies directly with increasing differences in the width/height ratios of the bars, and acoustic analyses have revealed that subjects are attending to the characteristics vibrational modes of the bars in order to make the discrimination. In more recent work with Perry Cook, we have looked at how listener can learn about and attend to the physical properties of simulated "shaker" instruments derived from particle models (Lakatos, Cook, and Scavone, 2000, Lakatos & Cook, in preparation)