Decay of auditory sensation: A model and new results from a reaction-time experiment
Stuart Rosen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1976
Plomp [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 36, 277–282 (1964)], in explaining results on the detection of gaps in noise bursts, suggested that auditory sensation decays as a power function of time. According to Plomp's interpretation, the sensations resulting from more intense stimuli have faster rates of decay than sensations resulting from less intense stimuli, in such a way that all sensations reach threshold at the same moment after stimulus offset, independent of intensity. This suggestion is made quantitative and the resulting model is applied to Homp's data and to new data exploring the effects of intensity on reaction time to offsets of noise bursts. [Work supported by NSF and NIH.]