Auditory temporal summation in humans

Abstract

Monaural sets of thresholds were obtained for 11 human subjects with normal hearing using 24 digitally generated stimuli with cosine onsets and offsets. The purpose of the work was to evaluate modeling of temporal summation data, particularly with respect to the duration assigned to rise‐fall time. Assuming similar central mechanisms, it should be possible to combine the temporal summation functions for single‐ and multiple‐burst stimuli by selection of the duration assigned to rise‐fall time. This duration was determined by regression analysis and was found to be, on the average, 39% of the equivalent duration calculated on the basis of stimulus power [P. J. Dallos and W. O. Olsen, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 36, 743–751 (1964)]. A combined summation function was obtained for each subject, and the average slope was 0.593. In no subject did the regression line account for less than 96.5% of the data variance. From these and other results in this experiment, it is concluded that the auditory system does not operate as a simple power integrator. [Work supported by NIH.]