Spectral specificity in auditory detection: The effect of listening on hearing

概要

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Many experimental data suggest that a listener who focused attention on a specific spectral region (or regions) becomes more sensitive to sounds falling there than elsewhere. Most often, the subject's task has been to detect a pure tone in noise. For example, in a two-interval, forced-choice paradigm, scores were around 90% when the signal was at an expected target frequencay (0. 5, 1, 2, or 4 kHz) and were near chance, 50%, when the signal was at an unexpected frequency more than a half critical band away. In other tests, subjects detected unexpected temporal patterns (repeated tone bursts) just as well as expected patterns, provided spectral frequencies were the same. It has aslo been shown that when listening to a sequence of tone bursts that rise (or fall) in frequency, subjects miss a burst at a frequency significantly different from the value it normally has in the sequence. Other data suggest similar spectral specificity in the discrimination of complex sounds, including speech. Just what mechanism improves performance remains unclear. Nevertheless, some measurements of evoked physiological responeses leave open the possibility that spectral specificity is achieved by efferent input to the auditory periphery, perhaps even to the cochlea.
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