Discrimination of the duration of a sound.

Abstract
A cam-operated stimulus controller giving continuously adjustable durations with or without a duration increment was used to determine the auditory duration thresholds of 11 persons. A 14% change in duration of a 50-db 500-cycle tone could be discriminated when the duration was 0.48 sec; at 0.032 sec. a change of 38% was necessary. Changes in the duration of weak and low pitched sounds had to be greater to be detected. The effects of altering the duration and intensity support the theory that stimulus intensity is integrated with respect to duration and that the perception of differences in the duration of sounds shorter than 0.5 sec. is fundamentally a discrimination of intensity differences.

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