ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

4pPP31. Training transfer in simple psychoacoustic tasks.

Res. Lab. of Electron., MIT, 36-709, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139

This paper reports preliminary results about the extent to which the learning curve in one psychoacoustic task is altered by practice in another psychoacoustic task. The primary interest in training transfer is motivated by the idea that variations in training transfer across tasks is closely related to structural properties of the perceptual system under consideration and, therefore, that results on training transfer should be useful in forming hypotheses about these properties. The tasks considered in this studies are frequency and intensity discrimination and the variables across which training transfer is being measured include, in addition to frequency versus intensity and left ear versus right ear, reference frequency, reference intensity, and increment size. [The authors are indebted to Lucia Vaina of Boston University for inspiring this research by informing them of equivalent work currently being conducted in the area of visual psychophysics.]