D. Mcfadden et Nl. Callaway, Better discrimination of small changes in commonly encountered than in less commonly encountered auditory stimuli, J EXP PSY P, 25(2), 1999, pp. 543-560
Citations number
47
Categorie Soggetti
Psycology
Journal title
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-HUMAN PERCEPTION AND PERFORMANCE
Results from 3 auditory tasks revealed that small changes made in stimuli c
ommonly encountered in everyday life are more easily discriminated than are
the same changes made in stimuli not as commonly encountered. The tasks re
quired discrimination of a frequency difference in 1 tone of 6-tone chords
or nonchords, discrimination of a duration difference in 1 note of common t
unes or nontunes, and discrimination of the deletion of a band of frequenci
es from speech sounds prayed forward or backward. Different crews of colleg
e-aged listeners served in the different tasks. Lf future research shows th
is difference in discriminability to be a general property of commonly enco
untered stimuli-attributable to a difference in the way they are processed
in the nervous system-then discrimination tests of this sort could become u
seful for assessing whether stimuli have made the transition from one form
of processing to the other.