Slippery context effect and critical bands.
This article explored the slippery context effect: When Ss judge the loudness of tones that differ in sound frequency as well as intensity, stimulus context (relative intensity levels at the 2 frequencies) can strongly influence the levels that are judged equally loud. It is shown that the size of the slippery context effect depends on the frequency difference between the tones: Small frequency differences (less than a critical bandwidth) produced essentially no slippery effect; much larger differences produced substantial effects. These results are consistent with a model postulating the existence of a central attentional or preattentive "filter-like" process whose weighting coefficients represent the size of the absolute as opposed to the relative (contextual) component of loudness perception and judgment.
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John B. Pierce Laboratory, New Haven, Connecticut 06519.
Warner
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D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception; D008297:Male; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013018:Sound Spectrography