Pulsation threshold test: Evidence for the existence of two biases and discussion of their implications

Abstract

The pulsation threshold (PT) technique developed by Houtgast [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 51, 1885–1894 (1972)] is very often used in psychoacoustic studies, but the basic phenomenon remains incompletely explained. Moreover, in the literature there exist many variants of procedure, and a rather important degree of dispersion in experimental results. Here we report an experimental set of PT data, demonstrate the existence of two biases that explain the dispersion, and give a quantitative description of their characteristics. One of these biases can be interpreted as coming from auditory fatigue phenomena. It appears finally that the ‘‘classical’’ interpretation of PT results cannot adequately fit our observations.