Auditory temporal resolution plays a critical role in the everyday experience of listening to complex acoustic patterns. The two most commonly-used methods for assessing auditory temporal resolution are gap detection and amplitude modulation (AM) detection. In an attempt to develop a standardized clinical test of auditory temporal resolution, we used Zippy Estimation by Sequential Testing (ZEST), a Bayesian threshold estimation procedure, to measure gap and AM detection thresholds. ZEST is considered to be one of the most efficient threshold estimation methods and is more efficient than standard transformed up-down procedures. We conducted simulations and experiments, in which we measured gap and AM detection thresholds using ZEST in two stages. In the first stage, we tried to identify ZEST parameters that would yield efficient and precise threshold measurements. The results showed that with appropriate sets of parameter values it was possible to complete the threshold measurements within 20 trials with reasonable precision. In the second stage, we used bimodal distributions consisting of the threshold distributions of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired participants, which were obtained in the first stage, as the initial probability density functions for ZEST. The use of these bimodal distributions further speeded up the threshold measurements.
Mori et al. (2025) studied this question.