Interaural Time j.n.d.s for Acoustic Transients

Interaural time j.n.d.s for low-frequency tonal stimuli are little affected by large temporal displacements from the midline [Herschkowitz and Durlack, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 46, 1964 (1969)]. This seeming inconsistency with Weber's law may be due to redundancy in the temporal properties of sinusoidal waveforms, which in turn reduces variance in interaural timing. In order to test this concept, we measured the effects of large delays on the time j.n.d.s for auditory clicks. Baseline delays ranged from 0 to 500 μsec. The stimuli were moderate intensity, 100–2000 Hz bandpass (BP) and 3000–4000 Hz BP clicks. The j.n.d.s showed an approximately linear increase with the baseline offset, with those at 500-μsec delay being as much as three times those at 0 μsec.