Some effects of different maskers on psychophysical performance in discrimination and detection tasks

Psychophysical performance was measured in a number of different tasks in order to compare performance under different masking conditions. With the noise masker set to provide a given amount of masking, frequency discrimination of a 4-kHz tone was shown to be worse in a lowpass noise than in a wideband noise. Discrimination of the intensity of the tone under these two masking conditions was comparable except at the lowest level of tone. Finally, the growth of detectability with level was measured in a detection task, with a greater slope being found in lowpass noise than in wideband noise. The results are discussed in light of the differences in physiological responses observed under similar masking conditions.