Backward Recognition Masking in Relative Pitch Judgments

Massaro, Dominic W.; Idson, Wendy L.

doi:10.2466/pms.1977.45.1.87

Cited by 23 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These results are largely predictable from the model presented here. The monotonic increase in accuracy with increases in stimulus duration and lSI can be described directly by Equation 1. More important, the increase in perceived duration for the form stimuli with increases in processing time replicates the current results and can be interpreted in a similar manner.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Temporal course of perceived auditory duration

Massaro

Idson

1976

Perception & Psychophysics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A series of experiments explored the temporal course of the perceived duration of an auditory stimulus. A backward recognition masking paradigm was utilized, in which the subject was to determine which of two target durations was presented on a given trial. The target tone was followed, after a variable silent intertone interval, by a masking tone which could assume one of three possible durations. Identification of the long target was found to improve consistently with increases in the intertone interval. In contrast, identification of the short target was as accurate at the short as at the long intertone intervals. Blocking the intertone interval across experimental sessions eliminated these differences between the two target tones. Performance on both the long and the short target tones improved monotonically with increases in the intertone interval. When masking tone duration was randomized within an experimental session, identification of the long (short) target was most accurate with the longer (shorter) masking tone. Blocking the duration of the masking tone across experimental sessions eliminated the effect of the duration of the mask, but did not alter any of the other results. A model, proposed to account for the results, assumes that the percept of target duration grows over time, and can be terminated by the onset of the masking tone. The masking tone also acts to lengthen the perceived duration of the target tone, and this lengthening is a direct function of the duration of the masking tone.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Temporal course of perceived auditory duration

Massaro

Idson

1976

Perception & Psychophysics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Hence, it seems clear that in both of our conditions the initial rise of d′ stemmed from a deleterious effect of S2 on the perception of S1 rather than from a deleterious effect of S1 on the perception of S2. Presumably, as Massaro and Idson (1977) suggested in their related study, optimal perceptual processing of S1 was not possible when S2 occurred soon after it. But why did the perceptual processing of S1 require a longer duration in the 30-cycles condition than in the 6-cycles condition?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Several hundreds of milliseconds also seem to be needed for the optimal discrimination of formant transitions in synthetic syllables, according to Pisoni (1973). Finally, in the domain of pitch, an effect of the same type was reported by Massaro and Idson (1977). Their stimuli were 20-msec bursts of sinusoids differing in frequency and, as in Sorkin's study, the two stimuli used on a given trial were presented either to the same ear or to opposite ears.…”

mentioning

confidence: 87%

The slow formation of a pitch percept beyond the ending time of a short tone burst

Demany¹,

Semal²

2005

Perception & Psychophysics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Perception takes time, and the amount of time required to perceive one attribute of a given sound as accurately as possible may far exceed the duration of the stimulus itself. Such a view has been supported by a number of auditory discrimination experiments in which performance was assessed as a function of the time interval separating the two stimuli presented on a given trial. When short stimuli were used, it was typically found that discrimination performance improved as the interstimulus interval (ISI) increased, in a range with an upper boundary that was often well above 200 or 300 msec. Tanner (1961) may have been the first to report such data. In an experiment on intensity discrimination, he found that performance (measured in terms of d′) was optimal for an ISI of about 600 msec, decreased slowly for larger ISIs, and dropped much more abruptly for smaller ISIs. In his brief description of this experiment, Tanner did not specify his stimuli. However, his basic result was replicated by Sorkin (1966), who used 50-msec tone bursts in a similar experiment and also found an optimal ISI of about 600 msec when the two stimuli produced on a given trial were presented to the same ear. Sorkin further observed that the optimal ISI was only slightly smaller if the two stimuli were instead presented to opposite ears. This observation is important because it rules out the idea that the need for an appreciable ISI for optimal performance could be due entirely to a forward masking of the second stimulus by the first one at very short ISIs. Forward masking was minimized when the two stimuli were presented to opposite ears. Thus, at least in this case, the ISI effect clearly meant that several hundreds of milliseconds were needed to perceive the first stimulus optimally after its offset. Taylor and Smith (1975) and Berliner, Durlach, and Braida (1977) corroborated Tanner's (1961) and Sorkin's (1966) findings in subsequent studies on intensity discrimination. Furthermore, analogous results were obtained for other acoustic continua. For instance, the studies of Small and Campbell (1962) and Carbotte (1973) indicate that it is necessary to use an ISI exceeding 200 msec in order to measure optimal performances in the discrimination of short sounds differing in duration. Several hundreds of milliseconds also seem to be needed for the optimal discrimination of formant transitions in synthetic syllables, according to Pisoni (1973). Finally, in the domain of pitch, an effect of the same type was reported by Massaro and Idson (1977). Their stimuli were 20-msec bursts of sinusoids differing in frequency and, as in Sorkin's study, the two stimuli used on a given trial were presented either to the same ear or to opposite ears. In both cases, discrimination performance, measured in terms of P(C) (percent correct), appeared to improve from a level close to chance for an ISI of 5 msec to an optimum level for an ISI of about 350 msec.Before the study that we just mentioned, Massaro had conducted a series of related experiments in which th...

show abstract

“…Demany, Montandon, and Semal (2005) found that frequency discrimination between two sequentially presented brief tones actually improved as the ISI between them increased from 0 to approximately 500 ms, and then deteriorated only for longer ISIs. The former effect could be related to a reduction in backward recognition masking as ISI increases beyond 0 ms (Massaro, 1975; Massaro & Idson, 1977). Based on this finding, the difficulty experienced by our participants in the Sequential condition could be because the tones are presented directly after one another, rather than because of a decay in the memory trace between the time of the first and second pitch estimates.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual grouping affects pitch judgments across time and frequency.

Borchert¹,

Micheyl

Oxenham

2011

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Pitch, the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency (F0), plays an important role in speech, music and animal vocalizations. Changes in F0 over time help define musical melodies and speech prosody, while comparisons of simultaneous F0 are important for musical harmony, and for segregating competing sound sources. This study compared listeners’ ability to detect differences in F0 between pairs of sequential or simultaneous tones that were filtered into separate, non-overlapping spectral regions. The timbre differences induced by filtering led to poor F0 discrimination in the sequential, but not the simultaneous, conditions. Temporal overlap of the two tones was not sufficient to produce good performance; instead performance appeared to depend on the two tones being integrated into the same perceptual object. The results confirm the difficulty of comparing the pitches of sequential sounds with different timbres and suggest that, for simultaneous sounds, pitch differences may be detected through a decrease in perceptual fusion rather than an explicit coding and comparison of the underlying F0s.

show abstract

Backward Recognition Masking in Relative Pitch Judgments

Cited by 23 publications

References 15 publications

Temporal course of perceived auditory duration

Temporal course of perceived auditory duration

The slow formation of a pitch percept beyond the ending time of a short tone burst

Perceptual grouping affects pitch judgments across time and frequency.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About