A power law transformation resulting in a class of short-term integrators that produce time-intensity trades for noise bursts

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Abstract
Recent work on temporal masking and temporal resolution indicates that acoustic stimuli are combined to a degree determined by their temporal proximity [D. Ronken, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 47, 1091–1099 (1970); J. H., Patterson, Jr., Ph.D thesis (1970) (unpublished); M. J. Penner, Percept. Psychophys. 18, 114–120 (1975)]. For broadband stimuli, the process of combining inputs has been modeled as resulting from an exponential integrator with a time constant of 2–4 ms. Such models seem to suggest that stimuli more than, say, 20 ms apart are treated largely as separate inputs. In contrast, the classical view, based on the results from time‐intensity trades, holds that broadband noise stimuli are integrated together for 100–200 ms [W. R. Garner, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 19, 808–815 (1947)]. This difference in the period over which stimuli are integrated therefore varies by about two orders of magnitude according to research in the two areas. It may be that the difference in the magnitude of the time constants reflects the plasticity of the auditory system. However, in this paper we show one way to eliminate the apparent discrepancy by demonstrating that there exists a class of short‐term integrators, operating on some fractional power of the stimulus intensity, that can produce the time‐intensity trade data.

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