On the Effect of Practice and Motivation on the Threshold of Audibility

The thresholds of audibility for 100 and for 1000 cps have been measured on five groups of originally naive listeners by various experimental techniques. All the experiments showed improvement of the threshold with practice. The improvement was greater at 100 cps than at 1000 cps. Pretraining at 1000 cps did not affect the threshold change at 100 cps. The improvement of the threshold with practice was enhanced considerably by reward and feedback.