ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

2pPP43. The effect of different component means and variances on the discrimination of temporal patterns.

Toktam Sadralodabai

Robert D. Sorkin

Dept. of Psychol., Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611

Listeners were presented with two successive 9-tone sequences. The task was to discriminate between the temporal patterns defined by the intertone times in each sequence (tone duration=25 ms, tone frequency=1000 Hz). The listener had to indicate whether the two patterns had the same or different (partially correlated) temporal envelopes. A technique suggested by Lutfi [R. Lutfi, 1339 (1995)], was used to determine the importance of each temporal position on the listener's decision. In the first experiment, one of the intertone times was assigned a different (either higher or lower) mean duration than the others. This intertone time occurred either at an early temporal position (2nd) or at a late position (6th). Results indicated that two positions, the first temporal position and the position with the different mean, had more influence on the listener's decision than other positions. In the second experiment, the first 4 intertone times were assigned a different variance than the last occurring 4 intertone times. Initial results suggest that listeners give higher weights to the temporal positions with the lower variance. [Work supported by AFSOR.]