Frequency discrimination and signal detection in band-reject noise

An experiment was conducted in order to compare the importance of information from frequency regions remote from the nominal signal frequencies for frequency discrimination and signal detection. In both tasks, signals were presented within the "notch" of band-reject noise, and different notch widths were employed. The results indicate that information is integrated over a wider range in frequency discrimination than in signal detection. Further, experiments in which a noise floor was present as well as band-reject noise, indicate that disrupting the information from regions remote from the nominal signal frequencies impairs frequency discrimination even in the absence of any significant impairment of signal detection performance.