"Sensitivity to Brief Changes in Intensity: Modeling the Sensory Trace Comparison with an Amplitude Modulation Filterbank"
ABSTRACT
This talk will describe a series of experiments leading up to and including my dissertation work. The primary question under investigation is how human listeners detect a brief change in the intensity of an ongoing tone. When this situation is conceptualized as a signal detection task where the signal is a brief tone pulse added to a longer tonal pedestal, the mechanism is usually thought to be the same as that responsible for detecting a tone pulse in the presence of a masking noise. In particular, it is assumed that listeners are integrating the energy in the critical band containing the signal and making judgments based on the amount of energy detected. This "energy detection" model (Green and Swets, 1966) works well for tones in noise and has allowed researchers to estimate the duration over which energy is integrated (roughly 200 ms).