When more noise is preferred than less: Exploring the “peakend rule” in retrospective judgments of sound quality

摘要

The so called “peak+end rule” suggest that the peak and the end of any human experience are thernmain determinants of overall retrospective evaluations of the same experience. This idea hasrnsome interesting implications for product sounds quality optimization: 1) when optimizingrnsounds, special effort should be directed at the peak and end of the sound, 2) by adding a betterrnend or improving the peak, the overall experience can be significantly improved, and 3) otherrnmodifications (than the peak and end) may have little effects on evaluations. An experiment isrnreported where participants were exposed to a 60 sec complex sound at 80dBA and the samernsound with 30 sec 50 dBA noise added at the end. Contrary to both noise perception- and humanrnjudgment theories, the results showed that the 60 sec sound was significantly less preferred/morernannoying than the 90 sec sound. Implications and applications for the “peak-end rule” for soundrnperception and sound quality modeling are discussed.