CUEING MECHANISMS IN AUDITORY SIGNAL-DETECTION

Detection of auditory signals under frequency uncertainty can be impro ved by presenting: cues to the listeners. Since various cues have been found to differ in effectiveness, three conceivable mechanisms were c onsidered which might account for these differences. Cuing might reduc e the number and/or width of the employed auditory filters or listenin g bands. Also, cues could modulate the precision of frequency tuning o f the filters. Psychometric functions were collected in a detection ex periment with frequency uncertainty employing three kinds of cues: pur e tones whose frequency was identical to that of the signal (iconic cu es), complex tones with a missing fundamental equal to the signal (com plex cues), and pure tones with a certain frequency relation to the si gnal (relative cues). Compared with a no-cue condition, all cue types improved detection performance. Fitting models to the data suggests th at in the no-cue condition as well as the complex-cue condition, multi ple bands were utilized, and that the iconic and relative cues induced single-band listening. There is no indication that accuracy of freque ncy tuning was responsible for cue-efficiency differences.