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Results for “Pitch Discrimination”

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PubMed1998

Detection of changes in timbre and harmonicity in complex sounds by zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus).

Thresholds for detecting alterations in the timbre and harmonicity of complex harmonic signals were measured in zebra finches, budgerigars, and humans. The stimuli used in this experiment were designed to have particular salience for zebra finches by modeling them after natural zebra finch calls. All 3 species showed similar abilities for detecting an amplitude decrement in a single component of a harmonic complex. However, zebra finches and budgerigars were extraordinarily sensitive to the mistunings of single harmonics and exhibited significantly lower thresholds compared with humans at 2 different fundamental frequencies, 570 Hz and 285 Hz. Randomizing relative phases of components in a harmonic stimulus resulted in a significant increase in threshold for detecting mistunings in zebra finches but not in humans. Decreasing the duration of mistuned harmonic stimuli resulted in higher thresholds for both birds and humans. The overall superiority of birds in discriminating inharmonicity suggests that birds and mammals may use different strategies in processing these complex harmonic sounds.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Spectral-shape discrimination. I. Results from normal-hearing listeners for stationary broadband noises.

This research is concerned with the ability of normal-hearing listeners to discriminate broadband signals on the basis of spectral shape. The signals were six broadband noises whose spectral shapes were modeled after the spectra of unvoiced fricative and plosive consonants. The difficulty of the discriminations was controlled by the addition of noise filtered to match the long-term speech spectrum. Two-interval discrimination measurements were made in which loudness cues were eliminated by randomizing (roving) the overall stimulus level between presentation intervals. Experimental results, examined as a function of intensity rove width, stimulus duration, and stimulus pair, were related to the predictions of a simple filter-bank model whose fitting parameter provides an estimate of internal noise. Most results, with the notable exception of duration effects, were predicted by the model. Estimates of internal noise in each frequency channel averaged roughly 7 dB for long-duration stimuli and 13 dB for short-duration stimuli. Results and predictions are compared to results of other studies concerned with the discrimination of spectral shape.

Humans↗
PubMed1986

Perception of missing fundamental by a species of songbird (Sturnus vulgaris).

Two experiments investigated whether a species of songbird perceives missing fundamentals in sounds containing complex frequencies. In Experiment 1, European starlings were trained to discriminate between two sinusoids. This discrimination persisted when the sinusoids were replaced with waveforms composed solely of four consecutive higher harmonics of the training frequencies. In Experiment 2, starlings trained to discriminate between two complex frequencies consisting of sets of higher harmonics transferred the discrimination to the sinusoidal fundamentals. The results demonstrate that starlings can perceive harmonic or periodic structure, and show that a species of songbird can use harmonic structure to gain information about its auditory environment. The findings, together with those obtained from fish and mammals, suggest that periodicity pitch perception may be a general process in vertebrate hearing.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2001

An electrophysiological response to different pitch contours in words.

A spoken word with more than one syllable contains a specific stress pattern found to be processed during spoken word recognition. The present study investigated the word's pitch contour as a single auditory parameter that marks stress. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while subjects made decisions to artificially pitch manipulated words. ERPs revealed that pitch contours are discriminated already within the first syllable of a word. Furthermore, behavioral responses for words with incorrect pitch contours were longer than for words with correct pitch contours. The results suggest that the pitch contour is an auditory feature of the spoken word that a listener automatically processes during spoken word recognition.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1995

P300 assessment of chronic fatigue syndrome.

The P3(00) event-related brain potential (ERP) was elicited with an auditory tone-discrimination paradigm in 25 patients diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and 25 matched normal control subjects. Target stimulus probability was varied systematically (0.20, 0.50, 0.80) in different task conditions. No differences between the CFS and control subjects were found for either P3 amplitude or latency. No group effects were observed for the N1, P2, and N2 components. Despite the attentional and immediate memory deficits reported in CFS, the P3 ERP from auditory stimuli does not reliably discriminate CFS from matched control subjects.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2000

Effects of differences in timbre on sequential grouping.

Differences in the timbre of sounds in a sequence can affect their perceptual organization. Using a performance measure, Hartmann and Johnson (1991) concluded that streaming could be predicted primarily by the extent to which sounds were passed by different peripheral channels. However, results from a rating task by Dannenbring and Bregman (1976) suggested that sounds in the same spectral region (passed by the same peripheral channels) can be allocated to different streams. In Experiment 1, it was found, using an interleaved melody task, that target sounds could be selected from distractors in the same spectral region more easily when they differed in timbre. This finding might result from primitive stream segregation or schema-driven selection, but not from peripheral channeling. In Experiment 2, a rhythm discrimination task was used, requiring the sounds to be integrated for good performance. Differences in timbre impaired performance, indicating the occurrence of primitive stream segregation.

Attention↗
PubMed1993

Stimulus duration and the sensory memory trace: an event-related potential study.

The mismatch negativity (MMN) of the auditory event-related potential is elicited when a stimulus deviates from that represented by the neural memory trace developed by preceding stimuli. The effect of stimulus duration on this trace was studied by presenting sequences of 1000 Hz, 80 dB stimuli to subjects engaged in silent reading. Stimuli were, in different blocks, either of 4, 10, 30, 100 or 300 ms in duration. 5% of the stimuli were deviants which were either higher in frequency (1050 Hz) or lower in intensity (70 dB) than the standards. The "silent" period between two successive stimuli was constant at 300 ms. The minimum stimulus duration with which a distinct MMN was elicited by frequency deviants was 30 ms, but the MMN amplitude was not increased when stimulus duration was further prolonged. In contrast, the intensity MMN was elicited even when stimulus duration of 10 ms and its amplitude increased as a function of stimulus duration. Reaction times and hit percentages in response to these deviant stimuli in a separate discrimination task displayed analogous patterns of results.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

A model of frequency discrimination with optimal processing of auditory nerve spike intervals.

This paper investigates phase-lock coding of frequency in the auditory system. One objective with the current model was to construct an optimal central estimation mechanism able to extract frequency directly from spike trains. The model bases estimates of the stimulus frequency on inter-spike intervals of spike trains phase-locked to a pure tone stimulus. Phase-locking is the tendency of spikes to cluster around multiples of the stimulus period. It is assumed that these clusters have Gaussian distributions with variance that depends on the amount of phase-locking. Inter-spike intervals are then noisy measurements of the actual period of the stimulus waveform. The problem of estimating frequency from inter-spike intervals can be solved optimally with a Kalman filter. It is shown that the number of inter-spike intervals observed in the stimulus interval determines frequency discrimination at low frequencies, while the variance of spike clusters dominates at higher frequencies. Timing information in spike intervals is sufficient to account for human frequency discrimination performance up to 5000 Hz. When spikes are available on each stimulus cycle, the model can accurately predict frequency discrimination thresholds as a function of frequency, intensity and duration.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1987

Frequency discrimination of short- versus long-duration tones by normal and hearing-impaired listeners.

This investigation explored the effects of stimulus level on the frequency discrimination of long- and short-duration pure tones by 5 subjects with normal hearing and 7 with sensorineural hearing impairment. Frequency difference limens (DLs) were obtained as a function of signal intensity for 5-ms and 300-ms tones at 500, 1000, and 2000 Hz. The performance of most of the hearing-impaired subjects was poorer than normal for 300-ms tones, but not for 5-ms tones. This result was relatively independent of the stimulus sensation levels at which the data were compared. However, the current results also show an unexpected dependence of the frequency DL on the sensation level of short-duration tones. In several normal-hearing subjects, frequency discrimination performance for these short tones is poorer at moderately high levels than at low levels.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Frequency discrimination and signal detection in band-reject noise.

An experiment was conducted in order to compare the importance of information from frequency regions remote from the nominal signal frequencies for frequency discrimination and signal detection. In both tasks, signals were presented within the "notch" of band-reject noise, and different notch widths were employed. The results indicate that information is integrated over a wider range in frequency discrimination than in signal detection. Further, experiments in which a noise floor was present as well as band-reject noise, indicate that disrupting the information from regions remote from the nominal signal frequencies impairs frequency discrimination even in the absence of any significant impairment of signal detection performance.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed1991

The processing of envelope information in comodulation masking release (CMR) and envelope discrimination.

In comodulation masking release (CMR), thresholds for a signal masked by a narrow-band noise are reduced when additional noise is present. To demonstrate CMR, the additional noise must have similar amplitude envelope fluctuations over time as the primary noise band masking the signal. The specific source of information that provides the reduction in masked threshold remains unclear, although it is the focus of recent interest. The envelope of the on-frequency masking band (OFB) changes with the addition of the signal at threshold: in the present work, the importance of these changes in providing the CMR has been investigated. First, CMR thresholds were collected in sinusoidally amplitude-modulated noises which varied either in the phase relationship of their envelopes or in their modulation depth. Then envelope discrimination (ED) thresholds were collected for changes in envelope phase disparity (i.e., envelope correlation) and for changes in modulation depth per se. The patterns of CMR thresholds with envelope phase disparity and with modulation depth are not similar to those of the ED thresholds. A computer simulation was conducted in which the stimulus waveforms were processed through an auditory model which comprised bandpass auditory filters, a square-law nonlinearity, and a sliding temporal window. The envelopes were then extracted from the processed waveforms to determine whether the envelope changes that occur in the signal intervals in the CMR and ED tasks may be similar. The results of this analysis indicate that discriminability of envelope correlation due to the addition of the signal at threshold in the CMR task was insufficient to explain CMR. However, the discriminability of changes in modulation depth due to the addition of the signal is in agreement with thresholds obtained from the CMR task.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Frequency discrimination thresholds: the effect of increment versus decrement detection of frequency.

Difference limen for frequency (DLF) is traditionally tested using a frequency increment detection paradigm in which listeners are requested to distinguish between a reference tone and a series of comparison tones of higher frequency. Sporadic findings indicated that an increment paradigm is not necessarily comparable to a decrement paradigm, in which the comparison tones are lower than the reference tone. The purpose of the present study was to test whether the ability to detect frequency increments is different from that of frequency decrements. DLFs of 16 young women were measured at 200 Hz and 1,000 Hz, using detection of both frequency increment and decrement paradigms. Results indicated that: (1) the frequency increment detection paradigm was significantly smaller (i.e., superior) to the decrement paradigm for the DLF task at 200 Hz, (2) for both frequencies, the number of participants who exhibited better DLF using the frequency increment detection paradigm was significantly larger than the number of those who had better DLFs using the frequency decrement paradigm, and (3) for both frequencies, strong correlations were found between DLFs obtained in the increment versus the decrement paradigms. These results have implications: (1) to studies whose subjects may have reduced sensitivities at frequencies higher than the reference tone (such as the hearing impaired), and (2) to models related to the role of auditory feedback on voice accuracy and to the underlying processes of frequency discrimination.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1984

Integration of spectral and temporal cues separated in time and frequency.

Subjects discriminated a "standard" pair of tone bursts (T1, T2) from a "comparison" pair (T1 + delta t, T2 + delta f), containing increments in the duration delta t of the first burst and/or the frequency delta f of the second burst. The threshold (d' = 2.0) for delta t was measured as a function of delta f, and the threshold for delta f as a function of delta t. The integration of increments in duration and frequency was studied as a function of the spectral and temporal separation between T1 and T2. A trade-off between the values of delta t and delta f required for d' = 2.0 performance was observed. This integration takes place when delta t, delta f occur simultaneously in the same spectral region, and when they occur separated by up to 120 ms, or by up to a full octave. The efficiency of integration was similar for all conditions of temporal and spectral separation studied, because the discriminability of delta t and of delta f is also nearly uniform across experimental conditions. The results from all experimental conditions are adequately described by a vector summation model derived from TSD. In a subsidiary experiment, subjects categorized pure tones varying in duration and frequency as "high" or "low" in pitch and "long" or "short" in duration. It was found that combined variations in duration and frequency result in essentially independent perceptual processes, although pitch has a small effect upon the perceived duration. It is concluded that spectral-temporal integration is a general ability operating in a variety of stimulus conditions.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Early exposure to non-native language alters pre-attentive vowel discrimination.

The present study examined whether early exposure in language immersion would result in better pre-attentive discrimination of non-native speech sound contrasts. Mismatch negativity (MMN) responses were measured from two groups of Finnish children. The Monolingual group had no prior exposure to other languages than the native one, while the Immersion group consisted of children attending a French immersion program. The subjects were presented with two vowel contrasts in the oddball paradigm: the first pair was phonemic in the native language and the second was a within category pair in Finnish, but phonological in French. The results revealed that the Monolingual group showed a larger response to the native contrast in comparison with the non-native one, whereas both contrasts elicited a similar response in the Immersion group. These results suggest that early exposure to a new language enhances the pre-attentive discrimination ability reflected in increased MMN amplitude.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1990

Cells in the rat auditory system have sensory-delay correlates during the performance of an auditory working memory task.

Single unit activity was recorded from rat auditory cortex (AC), medial geniculate body (MGB), and inferior colliculus (IC) during performance of a continuous nonmatching-to-sample task. The rats made go and no-go responses to indicate whether the current tone was the same as (match) or different from (nonmatch) the preceding tone. Between 31% and 55% of the units from AC, MGB, and IC showed sensory correlates (differences in activity to the two types of tones), indicating an involvement in sensory discrimination. Twenty percent of the units from AC and MGB had delay correlates (sustained differential activity during the delay immediately after the tones), indicating an involvement in retention. Most of the units with delay correlates also had sensory correlates. These results suggest that the auditory system, especially AC and MGB, discriminates and retains auditory stimuli in an auditory working memory.

Animals↗
PubMed1982

Frequency discrimination in regions of normal and impaired sensitivity.

Psychometric functions for frequency discrimination were obtained from both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners at 300, 1200, and 3000 Hz. Difference limens for frequency (DLFs) were derived from those psychometric functions after repeated practice sessions, ensuring that all listener's results represented levels of optimum performance. Practice effects were found to be considerable in many listeners. The psychometric functions for all listeners, both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired, were well described by linear functions of performance level (d') and frequency difference (Hz), which passed through the zero origin. Those listeners with normal sensitivity thresholds at all frequencies exhibited the most acute frequency discriminations. Listeners with sensitivity losses at high frequencies exhibited larger DLFs, even at lower test frequencies where sensitivity thresholds were normal.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Level-dependent critical bandwidth for phase discrimination.

Monaural phase discrimination was evaluated at 1000 Hz in six normal-hearing listeners as a function of the frequency difference between components in three-tone complexes at 40, 60, 80, and 100 dB SPL. The phase of the center component of 100% sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (SAM) waveforms was shifted by 90 degrees to produce quasi-frequency-modulated (QFM) waveforms that had identical long-term power spectra to the SAM waveforms but with different amplitude envelopes and temporal fine structure. At low modulation frequencies, where spectral components were close together and presumably all well within a single auditory filter, normal-hearing listeners could easily discriminate QFM from SAM waveforms. As modulation frequency increased, a point was reached where listeners could no longer distinguish QFM from SAM waveforms, referred to here as the critical bandwidth for phase discrimination (CBphs). Discrimination performance (d') was measured as a function of modulation frequency to yield a psychometric function for phase discrimination. From the psychometric function, CBphs was defined as the modulation frequency corresponding to d' = 1.0. At a carrier frequency of 1000 Hz, CBphs increased with level between 40 and 80 dB SPL according to the relation: CBphs = 34.I(0.136). Above 80 dB SPL, very little change in CBphs with level was seen. The increase with level of the geometric mean CBphs was predicted from level-dependent auditory filter slopes inferred from forward-masked tuning curves, as was the tendency to reach an asymptote above 80 dB SPL. Comparisons with previous work indicate that CBphs values from the best performing subjects were well within the audibility region for cubic difference tones. It is proposed that internally generated cubic difference tones interact with externally generated acoustic components, both limited by a level-dependent auditory filter, to produce an internal excitation envelope that is the basis for discriminating between SAM and QFM waveforms. It is also suggested that individual differences at low levels may be due to internal phase ambiguities.

Attention↗
PubMed1978

Frequency discrimination following the selective destruction of cochlear inner and outer hair cells.

Frequency discrimination was measured behaviorally before and after drug-induced lesions of cochlear hair cells in the cat. Discrimination was unaffected by complete loss of outer hair cells provided that at least 50% of inner hair cells were intact. Thus, inner hair cells are important for frequency discrimination, and they can function normally in this regard without the influence of outer hair cells.

Animals↗