Information integration of pooled versus paired samples
Daniel L. Weber · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1995
The sample-discrimination procedure asks listeners to identify from which of two possible distributions a given set of samples has been drawn. Typically, discriminability (d′ for a single sample) and information integration (inferred from the increase in d′ after n samples) are not as good as predicted by the observation-integration model. This research examined whether information integration could be improved by presenting n pairs of samples from the two distributions rather than presenting all n samples from one distribution then all n samples from the other (pooling samples). Pooled and paired presentations (n=1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, and 16) were examined for ‘‘easy’’ and ‘‘hard’’ conditions (large and small separations between means of the two distributions) for both duration discrimination and frequency discrimination. For all four of these conditions, higher d′s were always obtained for the pooled presentations. Pairing the samples failed to improve performance and, for the ‘‘hard’’ conditions, instead made information integration worse.