Apparent temporal-coding correlations across tasks vanish once age effects are removed

Evidence

It should be noted, however, that the positive correlation found for the TIME and HUGGINS tasks was due predominantly to the consistent age effect in the both tasks (see Fig. 1 ). When the effects of age were partialled out, the correlation coefficient was not significantly different from zero (r = − 0.24, p = 0.191), implying that the positive correlation was due to underlying non-temporal factors that are sensitive to aging. A candidate for such a factor is frequency selectivity. It has been argued that (intermediately) resolved frequency components of the SSMC could contribute to the performance of the TIME task (Micheyl et al. 2010 ). Peripheral frequency resolution could influence the representation of interaural correlation across a frequency axis, which is the basis for the Huggins pitch. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1082

Categorization

• XREF: A cautionary link example for my own writing on hearing: age is a confound that can manufacture false correlations between supposedly related measures.
• SEED: Could anchor an article on how age effects can masquerade as genuine perceptual-mechanism relationships in psychophysical experiments.