The effect of duration on the relative detectability of brief tonal bursts and gaps in the tone

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It is known that a burst of tone in noise is easier to detect than an equal duration gap in the same tone. A theory of temporal summation (Irwin & Kemp, 1976) predicts that the difference in detectability should decrease if the duration of the events is increased. A forced-choice experiment was performed with two durations (25 and 200 msec) and E/n0 held constant at 15 for bursts and 30 for gaps. As predicted, results showed shorter duration events to differ more in detectability than longer ones.