Adaptive staircase procedures trade efficiency and bias avoidance against convergence risk

Evidence

Adaptive procedures are quite common, since they avoid the subject-related bias effects, and since the threshold value can be found with a smaller number of tests than with the method of constant stimuli. However, the down side of this method is that it does not guarantee convergence, and the experimenter must carefully select the parameters used and verify that the results obtained are meaningful. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 929

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to psychophysical methodology discussions in hearing science and to the staircase method family from Levitt 1971 and Garcia-Perez 2011.