Temporal resolution of hearing probed by bandwidth restriction

This work investigates the temporal resolution of human hearing through its discrimination of the time constant of low-pass filtering applied to a periodic signal. While restricting the bandwidth affects both the amplitude spectrum and temporal definition of the signal, the direct amplitude changes in this experiment fall below their just noticeable differences. The discrimination therefore seems to be sensitive to phase in addition to spectral amplitude differences. An upperbound of τ ≈ 5 μs was obtained for the threshold time constant, showing that human temporal resolution extends down to time scales shorter than found in the past.