It has been shown that, when a narrow-bandpass filter is employed with a pulsed masker, signal detectability in the homophasic condition increases monotonically as signal duration decreases. In addition, pulsing the masker has been found to result in a decrement in antiphasic detection performance. The present study was designed to examine the effect of the interaction of stimulus bandwidth and type of masker presentation on the function relating detection performance to signal duration in homophasic and antiphasic conditions. Two interaural phase relations, N0S0 (homophasic) and N0Sπ (antiphasic), two types of masker presentation (continuous and pulsed), two bandpass filters (50 Hz and 200 Hz), and seven signal durations (5, 10, 20, 100, 500, and 1000 msec) were employed. The results of this study indicate that the changes in homophasic detection performance at short signal durations can be explained through consideration of the interaction of signal bandwidth with the assumed internal bandwidth of the auditory system and/or the bandwidth of the external filter employed. The masking-level difference, or MLD, obtained with the pulsed masker varied as the duration of the signal varied, while that obtained with the continuous masker was relatively constant over the entire range of signal durations.
It has been reported [D. McFadden, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 40, 1414–1419 (1966)] that the magnitude of the advantage exhibited by the binaural auditory system over the monaural auditory system when detecting a pulsed tonal signal in a background of pulsed masking noise is partially determined by the amount of time by which the onset of the pulsed masker precedes the onset of the pulsed signal. The present study was intended to determine whether the magnitude of the binaural advantage could also be increased by extending the duration of the masker beyond the offset of the signal. In this masking condition the onsets of the signal and masker occur simultaneously, but the offset of the signal precedes the offset of the masker. The results indicate that the magnitude of the binaural advantage increases slightly as the masker extends beyond the offset of the signal. The results are discussed in reference to current explanations of binaural detection phenomena.
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