Loudness scaling in rats and chinchillas.

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Abstract
Chinchillas and rats were trained on operant discriminations in which the discriminative stimuli were 2 different sound pressure levels of a 4 kHZ tone. Two or more of these 2 intensity discriminations were used at each of 3 levels of discriminability: high, medium and low. For any given level, each of the stimulus pairs used differed in decibel separation but were similar in loudness-unit differences calculated from a power function. Different groups of animals trained on stimuli separated by equal numbers of loudness units produced equivalent performances at each of the 3 levels of discriminability. Loudness growth for both of these species, as for man, is well described by a power function (Stevens'' law). For the chinchilla the exponent is 0.25, and for the rat is 0.35.

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