City Research Online

Abstract

Eight normal-hearing listeners practiced a tone-detection task in which a 1-kHz target was masked by a spectrally unpredictable multitone complex. Consistent learning was observed, with mean masking decreasing by 6.4 dB over five sessions (4500 trials). Reverse-correlation was used to estimate how listeners weighted each spectral region. Weight-vectors approximated the ideal more closely after practice, indicating that listeners were learning to attend selectively to the task relevant information. Once changes in weights were accounted for, no changes in internal noise (psychometric slope) were observed. It is concluded that this task elicits robust learning, which can be understood primarily as improved selective attention.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright 2014 Acoustical Society of America. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America. The following article appeared in Jones, P. R. , Moore, D., Shub, D. E. and Amitay, S. (2014). Learning to detect a tone in unpredictable noise. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 135(3), EL129-EL133 and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4865267
Subjects:	R Medicine > RF Otorhinolaryngology
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Optometry & Visual Sciences
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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