The utility of the ADSR waveform for information encoding is demonstrated by the broad range of unique waveforms that can be generated as well as the ability of this waveform to report changes in the quality of stimuli over time.
Under these circumstances it is clear that different systems evolved in the invertebrate nervous system in response to different qualities of stimuli in the environment to which the organism had to react one responsible for survival and the other for information.
Such findings would suggest that, in the absence of a pre-existing mental representation, participants rely on sound symbolic qualities of stimuli.
Instead, we have proposed a methodology that simply requires test subjects to adjust the quality of one stimulus to match the perceived quality of another fixed stimulus.
One of the questions that arise from the study is whether the social encounter-induced state of arousal is elicited by the 'social' quality of the stimulus or whether it simply results from the complexity of the stimulus.
In contexts in which the quality of the stimulus is uncertain, such as in typical RDM tasks in which the stimulus coherence is manipulated on a trial-to-trial basis (e.g., Palmer, Huk, & Shadlen, 2005), SPRT does not provide an accurate description of the data (cf. Bogacz et al., 2006; Hanks, Mazurek, Kiani, Hopp, & Shadlen, 2011).
A second distinction pertains the use of either a categorical scale (textual labels, describing the quality of the stimulus or the annoyance of the impairments) or a numerical scale.
At the end of each test presentation, a voting time followed, when the subjects were asked to rate the quality of the stimulus using a five-point ITU continuous adjectival scale.
Neither is this condition necessary for pleasure, since even a slightly sweet taste may yet be pleasant (and even, one might add, when one's taste buds are not at their very best or proportionally to the quality of the stimulus and of organ or act of perception as such).
The accuracy of the matching process is limited not only by the quality of the stimulus presented but moreover by the quality of the previously stored representation.
