A study of the near-miss involving Weber’s law and pure-tone intensity discrimination

A study of pure-tone intensity discrimination is presented in which amplitude changes are detected in 1000 Hz tone bursts 15–20 msec in duration. The masking function (log detectable increment vs log background intensity) is found to have a slope of 9/10 when calculations are carried out via energy measurements. This near-miss to Weber’s law is in agreement with other data reported in the literature. The masking slope proves to be essentially independent of stimulus duration between 15 msec and 1.5 sec. Our stable slope parameter is interpreted as a detectability restriction generated by “mass-flow” phenomena in the auditory channel. These phenomena are thought to be similar to the fluctuations accompanying a noisy or turbulent stream of events. Pure-tone intensity discrimination is then analyzed as a special case of energy detection.

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