Introductory Experiments in Auditory Time Sharing: Detection of Intensity and Frequency Increments

Abstract

Two preliminary experiments in a program to investigate the psychophysics of auditory attention are reported. Listeners were required to detect changes in intensity and frequency in pure‐tone bursts of 100‐msec duration under four conditions of attention, including undivided and divided attention. In the divided attention conditions, there was a lowering of the proportion of targets detected, and this was particularly true when targets occurred simultaneously on two channels with both requiring a response.