The effect of random intensity fluctuation on monaural and binaural detection

Two experiments were performed to determine the effects of random intensity fluctuation on NoSo and NoS pi performance. Noise was used as both signal and masker, and stimuli were bands of noise from either 0-2.0 or 2.0-4.0kHz. Signal and masker were either coherent (from the same source) or noncoherent (from independent sources). In the first experiment, noise fluctuation was achieved by modulating a wide band of noise. In the second experiment, fluctuation was achieved by narrowing the noise bandwidth. Results from both experiments indicated that NoSo performance was adversely affected by fluctuation and by noncoherent relation between signal and masker. NoS pi detection was not adversely affected by fluctuation at low frequency, and was affected less adversely than was NoSo detection at high frequency. This difference between NoSo and NoS pi performance is an important consideration when making inferences about monaural and binaural processing when the stimuli are fluctuating rather than temporally steady.