Pitch discrimination interference: the role of pitch pulse asynchrony.

Gockel, Carlyon, and Plack [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 1092-1104 (2004)] showed that discrimination of the fundamental frequency (F0) of a target tone containing only unresolved harmonics was impaired when an interfering complex tone with fixed F0 was added to the target, but filtered into a lower frequency region. This pitch discrimination interference (PDI) was greater when the interferer contained resolved harmonics than when it contained only unresolved harmonics. Here, it is examined whether this occurred because, when the interferer contained unresolved harmonics, "pitch pulse asynchrony (PPA)" between the target and interferer provided a cue that enhanced performance; this was possible in the earlier experiment because both target and interferer had components added in sine phase. In experiment 1, it was shown that subjects were moderately sensitive to the direction of PPA across frequency regions. In experiments 2 and 3, PPA cues were eliminated by adding the components of the target only, or of both target and interferer, in random phase. For both experiments, an interferer containing resolved harmonics produced more PDI than an interferer containing unresolved harmonics. These results show that PDI is smaller for an interferer with unresolved harmonics even when cues related to PPA are eliminated.