Observations on the Effect of Contralateral Noise on Intensive Differential Sensitivity

Abstract

Intensity DLs were obtained on normal hearing subjects at 500 and 4 000 Hz using two temporally different stimulus patterns in quiet and in the presence of a contralaterally presented noise. The DLI was found to be influenced by the noise, but whether the DLI became larger or smaller appeared at first to be dependent on the temporal pattern of the measurement stimulus. A second experiment, however, established that the effect of a contra-lateral noise on DLI magnitude may be more related to the proximity of background onset to increment onset than to the temporal nature of the background per se.