The Effects of Payoffs on Sensitivity and Bias in Absolute Identification of Intensity
Richard P. Lippmann, Louis D. Braida, N. I. Durlach · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1973
In our previous work on the identification of intensity [e.g., L. D. Braida, and N. I. Durlach, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 51, 483–502 (1972)], no attention was given to testing the implicit assumption that sensitivity and bias are independent. In the present series of experiments, sensitivity and bias were measured as a function of the payoff matrix. Maximum-likelihood estimates of sensitivity and bias were computed using an iterative procedure and the Thurstonian decision model of the preliminary theory. The results indicate that changes in payoffs cause changes in bias, but leave sensitivity invariant (consistent with the theory). Furthermore, the changes in bias were found to be similar to those that would occur for a receiver that is designed to maximize the expected value of the payoff. It is believed that these identification experiments provide a stronger test of the independence assumption than previous experiments using detection or discrimination paradigms.