Welcome to the Perceptual Science Laboratory
You can learn about our research and technology by surfing the links on this page.
A few highlights include the following. Gregg Oden and I collaborated to formulate a fuzzy logical model of perception, which has served as a framework for our research to this day. The success of this approach is perhaps best summed up by the title of a recent article, The Morton-Massaro Law of Information Integration: Implications for Models of Perception.
Movellan, J., and McClelland, J. L. (2001). Psychological Review, 108, 113-148.
To create synthetic visible speech, Michael Cohen and I developed visible speech synthesis using computer animation and psychological testing. We have the most accurate synthetic talking head in the world and this technology has been central to a broad range of studies of speech perception and emotion perception, which were published in Perceiving talking faces: From speech perception to a behavioral principle.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998.
It soon became apparent that our embodied conversational agent, Baldi, had practical value well beyond the presentation of speech in experimental inquiry. We have proven that our principles of speech perception and the technology and pedagogy of Baldi are effective in the learning of vocabulary and grammar by children with language challenges due to hearing loss or autism (Symbiotic Value of an Embodied Agent in Language Learning.
In Sprague, R.H., Jr. (Ed.), IEEE Proceedings of 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (CD-ROM), Computer Society Press, 10 pages. Best paper in Emerging Technologies).
Another project is aimed at helping persons with hearing loss by adding an additional channel of speech information on eyeglasses. This non-obtrusive device will perform continuous real-time acoustic analysis of his or her interlocutor's speech and transform several continuous acoustic features of the talker's speech into continuous visual cues displayed on the eyeglasses (
http://www.speechspecs.org/).
Finally, Baldi is now on the iPhone in a variety of applications (
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibaldi/id365360515?mt=8/).