Dimensional interactions in the perception of frequency and bandwidth

Abstract

As part of a project to develop efficient techniques for measuring the characteristics of tinnitus percepts, multiple listeners exhibited difficulties accurately perceiving the bandwidth of stimuli. Frequency perception seems to dominate bandwidth perception and relative bandwidth judgments seem to interact with frequency judgments in complex ways. In the present work, we use general recognition theory (GRT) to directly probe perceptual interactions between center frequency and bandwidth in noise stimuli. GRT is a multidimensional generalization of signal detection theory, and it allows us to simultaneously model within-category and between-category interactions between dimensions, as well as dimension-specific patterns of response bias. The most common stimulus set for GRT experiments consists of the factorial combination of two levels on each of two dimensions. In order to more fully investigate the perception of frequency and bandwidth, we extend this standard approach to encompass multiple factorial sets of stimuli spanning a larger region of frequency-by-bandwidth space. We will present multilevel Bayesian GRT models fit to frequency-by-bandwidth perception data.