DECISION RULES OF LISTENERS IN SPECTRAL-SHAPE DISCRIMINATION WITH OR WITHOUT SIGNAL-FREQUENCY UNCERTAINTY

Citation
Hp. Dai et al., DECISION RULES OF LISTENERS IN SPECTRAL-SHAPE DISCRIMINATION WITH OR WITHOUT SIGNAL-FREQUENCY UNCERTAINTY, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 99(4), 1996, pp. 2298-2306
Citations number
13
Categorie Soggetti
Acoustics
ISSN journal
00014966
Volume
99
Issue
4
Year of publication
1996
Part
1
Pages
2298 - 2306
Database
ISI
SICI code
0001-4966(1996)99:4<2298:DROLIS>2.0.ZU;2-W
Abstract
A correlation technique was used to assess the decision rules of three listeners in two cases of spectral-shape discrimination tasks. fn one case the signal frequency was fixed, and in the other it was randomly varied within each block of trials. In order to estimate the decision rule of the listeners, the experimenter superimposed random level per turbations on each frequency component upon each stimulus presentation . Over many trials, correlation coefficients were computed between the random perturbations and the binary responses of the listeners, and w ere expressed as a function of signal level. For both the fixed- and r andom-signal cases, the measured correlation functions were in reasona bly good agreement with those predicted based on the likelihood-ratio decision rules. Thus the listeners appeared to use information nearly optimally in discriminating spectral shapes. This investigation demons trated that the correlation technique can be used to reveal the decisi on rules for cases where the decision statistics are nonlinear functio ns of the observations. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of America.