Within- and between-frequency gap duration discrimination as a function of the standard duration

Abstract

It is well known that individuals exhibit worse performance during between-frequency gap detection than during within-frequency gap detection. A similar performance difference is also found between within- and between-frequency gap duration discrimination involving undetectably short standard durations. This is reasonable because such discrimination could be considered to be a variant of gap detection. However, because of the paucity of existing data, it is unclear whether frequency differences affects gap discrimination tasks involving longer standard durations. In this study, we measured within- and between-frequency discrimination thresholds in the presence of various standard durations from 1 to 100 ms. As a result, it was shown that the within-frequency thresholds were significantly lower than the between-frequency thresholds when a standard duration of 1-ms was employed, whereas there were no significant differences between them when the standard duration was >50 ms. This implies that the within- an...