Re: Auditory spatial stream segregation

[Al Bregman <al.bregman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Imran,

You asked whether or not to do a discrimination study before a stream
segregation task.  The answer is that it all depends on the purpose of
your experiment.  If all you want to do is to have a task in which
stream segregation occurs, just make sure that the perceived
difference is far greater than the discrimination threshold, and that
there is clear stream segregation, as determined by you and everybody
else that you ask to listen to the signal in an informal pretest.  If
you want to relate the segregation to the perceptual difference
between the two classes of sounds, then you will have to vary the
latter.  If you want to relate stream segregation to the
discrimination threshold, then, of course, you will have to measure
the threshold.

The purpose of the experiment determines what you measure.

Cheers,
Al
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Albert S. Bregman, Emeritus Professor
Psychology Department, McGill University
1205 Docteur Penfield Avenue
Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 1B1.
Phone: (514) 398-6103, Fax: (514) 398-4896
http://webpages.mcgill.ca/staff/Group2/abregm1/web/
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On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Imran Dhamani <imrandhamani@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Dear All,
>
> A special thanks to David, Diana, Al Bregman and Dennis, Thank you so much for your suggestions and advice. I have also noticed that most of the studies done recently of relatively novel stimuli for auditory sequential stream segregation try using a stimulus discrimination task before the streaming task to correlate both.( Eg. If amplitude modulated noise is used then initially a modulation rate discrimination task is used and then streaming). I was wondering as to the importance of doing the discrimination task as I noticed that in most of the circumstances streaming only occured when the two stimuli were also perceptually discriminable ( i mean the streaming threshold was above the discrimination threshold).
>
> Regards,
> Imran Dhamani
> $$$$$ monty@@@@
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