Discrimination of Interaural Time and Intensity

Discrimination tasks with a 500-Hz tone and involving various combinations of binaural time and intensity cues were used to generate binaural discrimination spaces. The resultant spaces indicate that the sensations which arise from interaural time cues and interaural amplitude cues are correlated with a correlation coefficient of approximately 0.88; that is, a large fraction of the total sensation arising from one interaural cue will add or subtract as a scalar quantity with the sensation produced by the other interaural cue, but a residual sensation will always remain for all combinations of time and intensity cues. The same spatial framework provides a good description of the results of time intensity trading tasks. When applied to an MLD detection paradigm, this framework provides predictions which are in qualitative agreement with masking studies using tones and narrow-band noise as maskers.