Determination of Intensity Discrimination and Detection Capabilities by Absolute Identification Procedures
R. M. Farrell, Craig Pynn, Louis D. Braida · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1968
Results of classical absolute-identification experiments on signal intensity indicate that when the number of stimuli is large, subjects make more identification errors than would be expected on the basis of the pairwise discriminability of the stimuli. These experiments, however, all employed interstimulus intensity increments that are large relative to discrimination ability. Recent work suggests that identification performance should be directly related to discrimination performance when the increments are small. Experiments using small increments have been conducted with tone pulses (discrimination) and with tone pulses masked by noise (detection). The results not only confirm the expected relationship (operating characteristics and sensitivity measures obtained with identification are the same as those obtained with conventional procedures), but indicate that the identification paradigm is very efficient for evaluating detection and discrimination capabilities. [Work supported principally by the National Institutes of Health and in part by the Joint Services Electronics Program.]