Cognitive Systems

You are here: Home > Research > Cognitive Systems

Glasses The birds in your backyard produce louder sounds than an airplane flying overhead, yet we perceive the airplane as ‘noise’. Measuring noise pollution therefore involves more than just counting decibels alone: you need a sensor system that listens to sound in the environment just like a person does. Cognitive Systems is developing methods to make that possible.

Research

The research group Cognitive Systems is conducting basic research into the way in which people perceive their environment, categorize and give meaning to what happens around them. The group is developing a methodology to translate the words that people use, such as noise, a din or a blaring, into knowledge that a sensor system is able to use. Psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists are working on this project in collaboration with physicists and engineers.

The focus of the research is on the analysis of questionnaires and semi-automatic categorization of discourse (people’s descriptions of their perception) and on the link with physical measurements of the perceived environment. The area of application of this research is sound quality and the aim is to determine automatically how people perceive and evaluate the sound (that exists) around them.

For the purpose of this research, INCAS³ uses a model of the human inner ear. This model of the cochlea provides a reliable visual representation of how sound is muffled or distorted as it arrives in the ear. The model can also be used to simulate hearing damage.

Sample project

Cognitive Systems is involved in the ‘Noise’ project of Sensorcity. Two hundred sound measuring devices will be fitted around the urban measuring network of the ‘sensor city’ of Assen, which will be used to study what type of sound is emitted into the environment. This will enable researchers to create a geographical sound map, like a sound forecast, which can show the times at which traffic noise is greater, for example.