The “3-down, 1-up” adaptive stimulus placement rules attributed to Levitt and Zwislocki were compared in the context of human interaural time difference discrimination, employing otherwise commonly used procedures (e.g., averaging reversals to estimate threshold). The Zwislocki rule typically accumulated over three more reversals than the Levitt rule but the rules were approximately equally efficient. This may be because the additional reversals did not provide additional information or that any additional information was countered by other factors, such as the lower theoretical asymptotic response probability (0.75 vs 0.794). Relative bias between rules was also explored with the aid of a simulation.

1.
Bernstein
,
L. R.
, and
Trahiotis
,
C.
(
2002
). “
Enhancing sensitivity to interaural delays at high frequencies by using transposed stimuli
,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
112
,
1026
1036
.
2.
Bernstein
,
L. R.
,
Trahiotis
,
C.
, and
Hyde
,
E. L.
(
1998
). “
Inter-individual differences in binaural detection of low-frequency or high-frequency tonal signals masked by narrow-band or broadband noise
,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
103
,
2069
2078
.
3.
García-Pérez
,
M. A.
(
2002
). “
Properties of some variants of adaptive staircases with fixed step sizes
,”
Spatial Vis.
15
,
303
321
.
4.
Hafter
,
E. R.
, and
Trahiotis
,
C.
(
1997
). “
Functions of the binaural system
,” in
Encyclopedia of Acoustics, Volume 3
, edited by
M. J.
Crocker
(
Wiley
,
New York
), pp.
293
302
.
5.
Koehnke
,
J.
,
Culotta
,
C. P.
,
Hawley
,
M. L.
, and
Colburn
,
H. S.
(
1995
). “
Effects of reference interaural time and intensity differences on binaural performance in listeners with normal and impaired hearing
,”
Ear Hear.
16
,
331
353
.
6.
Leek
,
M. R.
(
2001
). “
Adaptive procedures in psychophysical research
,”
Percept. Psychophys.
63
,
1279
1292
.
7.
Levitt
,
H.
(
1971
). “
Transformed up-down methods in psychoacoustics
,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
49
,
467
477
.
8.
Marvit
,
P.
,
Florentine
,
M.
, and
Buus
,
S.
(
2003
). “
A comparison of psychophysical procedures for level-discrimination thresholds
,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
113
,
3348
3361
.
9.
Saberi
,
K.
(
1995
). “
Some considerations on the use of adaptive methods for estimating interaural-delay thresholds
,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
98
,
1803
1806
.
10.
Saberi
,
K.
, and
Green
,
D. M.
(
1996
). “
Adaptive psychophysical procedures and imbalance in the psychometric function
,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
100
,
528
536
.
11.
Saberi
,
K.
, and
Green
,
D. M.
(
1997
). “
Evaluation of maximum-likelihood estimators in nonintensive auditory psychophysics
,”
Percept. Psychophys.
59
,
867
876
.
12.
Schlauch
,
R. S.
, and
Carney
,
E. J.
(
2003
). “
A comparison of Levitt and Zwislocki decision rules for use with forced-choice adaptive procedures
,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
113
,
2250
.
13.
Zwislocki
,
J.
,
Maire
,
F.
,
Feldman
,
A. S.
, and
Rubin
,
H.
(
1958
). “
On the effect of practice and motivation on the threshold of audibility
,”
J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
30
,
254
262
.
14.
Zwislocki
,
J. J.
, and
Relkin
,
E. M.
(
2001
). “
On a psychophysical transformed-rule up and down method converging on a 75% level of correct responses
,”
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
98
,
4811
4814
.
You do not currently have access to this content.