Measurement of the interaural amplitude threshold for a 500-Hz tone

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Abstract
In order to preclude changes in monaural loudness from serving as a cue in the discrimination of interaural amplitude, the amplitude of binaurally presented tone bursts was varied randomly across observation intervals. Subjects were required to discriminate a change in interaural amplitude and to disregard the overall level of the tones. In contrast to previous data reported by Hershkowitz and Durlach [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 46, 1464–1467 (1969)] for a constant-amplitude condition, interaural amplitude sensitivity decreased markedly as the interaural amplitude ratio decreased from unity. That observers can still detect an interaural amplitude difference of 4.0 dB with interaural amplitude ratios of 30 dB implies that binaural mechanisms, not monaural alone, must be postulated to explain this performance. In a second study, the effects of masking noise on interaural amplitude discrimination were investigated. Whereas the addition of noise to one ear did not increase the interaural phase threshold, the interaural amplitude threshold deteriorated rapidly upon addition of a monaural noise. The addition of a binaural in-phase noise to the signal, producing a correlated noise condition, markedly improved interaural amplitude sensitivity relative to the monaural masker condition.

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