TY - JOUR
T1 - Informational masking for simultaneous nonspeech stimuli
T2 - Psychometric functions for fixed and randomly mixed maskers
AU - Durlach, Nathaniel I.
AU - Mason, Christine R.
AU - Gallun, Frederick J.
AU - Shinn-Cunningham, Barbara
AU - Colburn, H. Steven
AU - Kidd, Gerald
N1 - Funding Information:
We are deeply indebted to our listeners for providing us with such interesting data, to Christine Carter and Sally Tressler for helping us collect this data, and to Dr. Tanya Arbogast, Dr. Laurel Carney, Dr. Robert Gilkey, Dr. G. Bruce Henning, Dr. Scott Isabelle, Dr. Robert Lutfi, Dr. Donna Neff, Dr. Virginia Richards, and Dr. Beverly Wright, as well as Sean Davidson and Yan (Felicia) Gai, for very useful communications during the preparation of this paper. We also wish to thank the associate editor and the reviewers for their substantial contributions to this effort. This work was supported by Grants NIH R01 DC04545 and DC00100, NIH F32 DC006526, and ONR N00014-04-1-0131.
PY - 2005/10
Y1 - 2005/10
N2 - Sensitivity d′ and response bias β were measured as a function of target level for the detection of a 1000-Hz tone in multitone maskers using a one interval, two-alternative forced-choice (1I-2AFC) paradigm. Ten such maskers, each with eight randomly selected components in the region 200-5000 Hz, with 800-1250 Hz excluded to form a protected zone, were presented under two conditions: the fixed condition, in which the same eight-component masker is used throughout an experimental run, and the random condition, in which an eight-component masker is chosen randomly trial-to-trial from the given set of ten such maskers. Differences between the results obtained with these two conditions help characterize the listener's susceptibility to informational masking (IM). The d′ results show great intersubject variability, but can be reasonably well fit by simple energy-detector models in which internal noise and filter bandwidth are used as fitting parameters. In contrast, the β results are not well fit by these models. In addition to presentation of new data and its relation to energy-detector models, this paper provides comments on a variety of issues, problems, and research needs in the IM area.
AB - Sensitivity d′ and response bias β were measured as a function of target level for the detection of a 1000-Hz tone in multitone maskers using a one interval, two-alternative forced-choice (1I-2AFC) paradigm. Ten such maskers, each with eight randomly selected components in the region 200-5000 Hz, with 800-1250 Hz excluded to form a protected zone, were presented under two conditions: the fixed condition, in which the same eight-component masker is used throughout an experimental run, and the random condition, in which an eight-component masker is chosen randomly trial-to-trial from the given set of ten such maskers. Differences between the results obtained with these two conditions help characterize the listener's susceptibility to informational masking (IM). The d′ results show great intersubject variability, but can be reasonably well fit by simple energy-detector models in which internal noise and filter bandwidth are used as fitting parameters. In contrast, the β results are not well fit by these models. In addition to presentation of new data and its relation to energy-detector models, this paper provides comments on a variety of issues, problems, and research needs in the IM area.
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U2 - 10.1121/1.2032748
DO - 10.1121/1.2032748
M3 - Article
C2 - 16266169
AN - SCOPUS:26844481813
SN - 0001-4966
VL - 118
SP - 2482
EP - 2497
JO - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
JF - Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
IS - 4
ER -