Gap Detection in Normal and Impaired Listeners: The Effect of Level and Frequency

Temporal summation and temporal resolution are often thought to be different aspects of the same integration process. However, a long integration time is required to optimize performance in a temporal summation task, whereas a short integration time is required to optimize performance in a temporal resolution task. Indeed, the integration times found in temporal summation experiments are typically one-to-two orders of magnitude larger than those found in temporal resolution experiments (for review, see Green, this volume, see also de Boer, this volume). It is possible to reconcile this large difference either by assuming that a compressive nonlinear transformation (Divenyi and Shannon 1983) or neural adaptation (Irwin and Kemp 1976; Irwin and Purdy 1982) takes place prior to integration, but in this paper we implicitly treat the two integration processes as separate by considering only temporal resolution and the corresponding short integration time.