A direct comparison between lateralization and detection under conditions of antiphasic masking

In order to compare lateralization and the detection of noise-masked signals under conditions of antiphasic masking, subjects were instructed to indicate the lateral displacement of signals presented at five levels of signal-to-noise ratio. The signals were 500-Hz 100-msec bursts of tone heard in a wide-band noise mask. A “likelihood ratio” analysis of lateralization data allowed a direct comparison between detection based on lateralized differences and detection obtained in a standard two-interval forced-choice detection experiment. It was found that the measure of detection based on lateralization is nearly the same as that actually obtained in the conventional detection experiment.