Binaural detection with reproducible short‐duration narrow‐band maskers

Hit and false alarm rates were measured for detection of a 500‐Hz tone target in each often samples of 1/3‐oct noise centered at 500 Hz with a duration of 10 ms, for both NoSπ and NoSo conditions. Two target waveforms were used, differing only in their phase relative to the masker. Three subjects are being tested, but extensive data is available from only one subject so far. Also, the NoSo experiment has been done for only one target phase. The NoSo hit rates correlate very well with the energies in the waveforms. For NoSπ, the effect of target phase on hit rate is substantial, with almost no correlation between the rates for the two target phases. This is very different from earlier results with long duration waveforms [e,g., Gilkey et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 78, 1207–1219 (1985)]. Neither models based on lateral position nor models based on the sum of the squares of the interaural differences correlate well with the data. Since subjects report multiple images and the interaural differences sometimes change substantially over the 10‐ms duration, models that process the first and second halves of the waveforms are analyzed separately. [Work suported by NINCDS.]