A systematical study for psychological impression caused by fluctuating random noise based on fuzzy set theory

Abstract

An opinion that the psychological impression caused by noise exposure can be regarded as a fuzzy event is first shown, based on the information obtained from an actual psychological experiment. That is, the psychological impression is essentially subjective and originally includes fuzziness. The above subjective psychological impression is grasped quantitatively by using the so-called membership function in the field of fuzzy set theory. Next, a new systematical method for estimating and/or predicting the psychological impression is proposed, in the case when the persons are exposed to the fluctuating random noise of arbitrary probability distribution type. Finally, the validity and usefulness of the proposed method are confirmed experimentally by applying it to the actually observed data for road traffic noise.