Temporal Discrimination in Different Types of Auditory Patterns

Abstract

Discrimination functions for temporal differences within auditory patterns were measured under two experimental conditions. One of these was the frequency separation of the elements in the pattern; the other was the type of pattern or the way in which the elements were combined. All of the auditory patterns utilized a basic unit consisting of two tones of different frequency separated by a variable amount of silence. This basic unit was presented alone and in various combinations of other tones so that the discrimination results with the various patterns could be compared directly. Discrimination of the temporal differences between the two tones was measured by the ABX technique. The results showed that discrimination of differences in time of onset was consistently better when the frequency separation of the tones in the pattern was small than when the tones were widely separated. There was a further difference in discrimination in the various types of patterns, the same temporal difference being much easier to discriminate in some patterns than in others. These results are compared with those from a visual experiment in which the same patterns were formed by using the spectrographic transformation between audition and vision. (Work supported in part by the Haskins Laboratories and the Air Force Cambridge Research Center.)