Abstract
Recently both neurophysiological and psychophysical theories have suggested that the sensitivity of receptors, or of the whole organism, may change through “efferent control” or as a result of “motivation.” A psychophysical method has been devised to investigate changes in a listener’s ability to detect signals in a noisy background, which are elicited “on demand” by the E, and when the time course of the changes may be in the order of seconds rather than minutes orhours. Observed effects, which are consistent with the hypotheses of active control of sensitivity, are found to be orderly but quite small, generally less than that associated with a 1–2 dB increase in the level of a tonal signal. While the average increment in performance is thus slight, it is found that the variance between Ss is significantly reduced when strong motivating stimuli are introduced. This reduction in variance may reflect an upper limit on the performance of real listeners, which might be fruitfully compared with the theoretical limits proposed in the theory of signal detectability.
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The research reported here was conducted at the Defense Research Laboratory, The University of Texas, through the support of contracts with the U. S. Navy, Bureau of Ships, and with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Support for preparation of the manuscript was provided by the National Institutes of Health, through the Central Institute for the Deaf. The authors are indebted to Prof. Lloyd A. Jeffress for his many valuable comments.
The experimental work described in this article was carried out by the second author in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master’s degree in psychology from the University of Texas, Austin.
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Watson, C.S., Clopton, B.M. Motivated changes of auditory sensitivity in a simple detection task. Perception & Psychophysics 5, 281–287 (1969). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209563
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209563