title: Different auditory filter bandwidth estimates based on profile analysis, notched noise, and hybrid tasks.
abstract: Auditory filter bandwidths were estimated in three experiments. The first experiment was a profile-analysis experiment. The stimuli were composed of sinusoidal components ranging in frequency from 200 to 5000 Hz. The standard stimulus was the sum of equal-amplitude tones, and the signal stimulus had a power spectrum that varied up-down ... up-down. The number of components ranged from four to 60. Interval-by-interval level randomization prevented the change in level of a single component from reliably indicating the change from standard to signal. The second experiment was a notched-noise experiment in which the 1000-Hz tone to be detected was added to a noise with a notch arithmetically centered at 1000 Hz. Detection thresholds were estimated both in the presence of and in the absence of level randomization. In the third, hybrid, experiment a 1000-Hz tone was to be detected, and the masker was composed of equal-amplitude sinusoidal components ranging in frequency from 200 to 5000 Hz. For this experiment, thresholds were estimated both in the presence and absence of level variation. For both the notched-noise and hybrid experiments, only modest effects of level randomization were obtained. A variant of Durlach et al.'s channel model ["Towards a model for discrimination of broadband signals," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 63-72 (1986)] was used to estimate auditory filter bandwidths for all three experiments. When a two-parameter roex(p,r) filter weighting function was used to fit the data, bandwidth estimates were approximately two to three times as large for the two detection tasks than for the profile-analysis task.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104, USA.
authors.forename: J J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Lentz
authors.forename: V M
authors.initials: VM
authors.lastname: Richards
authors.forename: M R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Matiasek
mesh_terms: D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D011601:Psychophysics