Binocular contrast interactions in human vision were studied psychophysically. Thresholds were obtained for sinewave grating stimulation of the right eye in the presence of simultaneous masking gratings presented to the right eye (monocular masking) or left eye (dichoptic masking). In the first experiment, thresholds were measured at 0.25, 1.0, 4.0, and 16.0 cycle per degree (cpd) as a function...

Patients suffering from conductive or mixed hearing loss may benefit from bone-conduction hearing systems (BAHS). The amount of amplification provided by the hearing system is selected based on the individual's sensorineural frequency-specific threshold. With patients who are not able to provide thresholds behaviorally, such as young children, objective methods are required to estimate the unai...

The frequency of workers adopting different behaviours often depends on thresholds. If too few workers are foraging, for example, then those workers with relatively low foraging thresholds begin to collect food. The regulation of colony phenotype is controlled by frequency-dependent feedback among worker threshold values. I show that, for a given average threshold value among workers, variabili...

The purpose of this study was to describe the relationship between sequential stream segregation abilities of listeners with hearing loss and the ability to recognize pairs of sentences spoken simultaneously by a man and a woman. In the streaming task, the fusion threshold was measured as the frequency separation at which listeners could no longer perceptually separate a series of fixed and var...

Poor discrimination of nonlinguistic sounds has been implicated in language-learning problems in children, but research evidence has been inconsistent. This study included 32 participants with specific language impairment (SLI) and 32 typically developing controls aged 7-16 years. Frequency discrimination thresholds were estimated in a task where participants had to distinguish a higher-frequen...

Young and elderly subjects yielded forced-choice detection thresholds in each of seven sensory tasks: (1) taste of sodium chloride, (2) smell of butanol, (3) cooling, (4) low-frequency vibrotaction, (5) high-frequency vibrotaction, (6) low-frequency hearing, and (7) high-frequency hearing. Average scores across these tasks nearly perfectly separated the 22 elderly from the 15 young subjects. Fo...

Two experiments were performed for this study. The purpose of both experiments was to examine the validity of pure-tone hearing thresholds obtained near the rising portion of a sensorineural hearing loss. Recent work by other investigators has suggested that thresholds obtained near the rising portion of the audiogram may not correspond to the severity of damage at the cochlear place associated...

n aging research, it is common to compare two groups, young adults and elderly persons. One might ask, for example, whether speech perception in a noisy background is more difficult for elderly persons because of age-related changes in cognition, central processing, memory deficit, depression, or a host of other factors known to be affected by aging. A persistent problem complicating such resea...

Thresholds were measured for a 6-kHz sinusoidal signal presented within a 500-ms masker. The masker was either a bandpass Gaussian noise of varying bandwidth, or a sinusoid of the same frequency as the signal. The spectrum level of the noise masker was kept constant at 20 dB SPL, and the level of the sinusoidal masker was 40 dB SPL. Thresholds for signal durations between 2 and 300 ms were meas...