TWO FOR ONE : DISCRIMINABILITY FUNCTIONS CAN PRODUCE BOTH MASKING AND FIXED-SIGNAL FUNCTIONS.

Authors

  • Daniel Shepherd
  • Michael J. Hautus

Abstract

Auditory level discrimination tasks require observers to judge which of two stimuli, X or X+ΔX, has the greater level. Four observers participated in a two-alternative forced-choice

task with two 10-ms bursts of 1000-Hz sinusoids of level X and X+ΔX. Sinusoids were presented in quiet. Five discriminability functions were collected, each based on seven values of ΔX. From these functions, masking and fixed-signal functions can be constructed by extracting the relevant information from each of the five discriminability functions. By comparing the masking and fixed-signal functions it should be possible that the units problem in audition can be brought to finality.

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