Frequency discrimination of tones presented in filtered noise.

Previous research (Emmerich et al., 1983) in which tones were presented in the center of the notches in band-reject noise backgrounds suggests that information from frequency regions remote from the nominal signal frequency is useful in frequency discrimination. The present work extends the earlier findings by presenting tones on either side of a notch so that only one (or the other) tail of the excitation patterns of the tones would fall into the notch. In addition, tones were presented in high-pass noise, low-pass noise, and various combinations of the two. The results again indicate that remote information affects frequency discrimination, and they are also consistent with the hypothesis that the low-frequency tail of the excitation pattern is more useful for frequency discrimination than is the high-frequency tail.