The correlation between responses under monaural and binaural conditions

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 92; no. 4_Supplement; p. 2298
• Main Author: Gilkey, R. H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-10-1992
• DOI: 10.1121/1.405126
• ISSN: 0001-4966

Gilkey etal. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 78, 1207–1219 (1985)] compared ‘‘monaural’’ (NoSo) and ‘‘binaural’’ (NoSπ) performance in a reproducible noise masking task. Despite a large masking level difference, the responses to individual noise samples under the NoSo and NoSπ conditions were highly correlated (p≪0.001). Isabelle and Colburn [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 352–359 (1991)], on the other hand, found correlations that were weak, and sometimes negative. Gilkey etal. used wideband masking noise, whereas Isabelle and Colburn used narrow-band maskers. On that basis, Isabelle and Colburn argued that the correlation observed by Gilkey etal. might be more appropriately attributed to similarities in across-critical-band processing, rather than to similarities in within-critical-band processing. The present study examined both wideband and narrow-band maskers and found highly significant correlations between monaural and binaural performance for both maskers (p≪0.005). [Work supported by NIH-DC-000786 and AFOSR-91-0289.]