Psychoacoustic results depend on experimental procedure and sensitivity rises with alternatives.

Evidence

Results obtained in psychoacoustical experiments generally depend on the procedure used. As a rule the sensitivity of a subject is enhanced if a comparison among several alternatives is possible. Concerning the measurement time and efficiency of the different procedures, methods which directly yield an estimate, such as adjustment, tracking or magnitude estimation, are very time efficient. However, with procedures which require a psychometric function like “yes-no” and “multiple alternative forced-choice” procedures, it takes many trials, and hence much time to arrive at stable results. With respect to adaptive procedures, the time necessary to arrive at a psychoacoustically meanigful value depends significantly on the details of the algorithm implemented. A compromise has to be found between the final step size and the number of trials necessary, because higher accuracy, i.e. a smaller step size, goes with a larger number of trials. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 119

Categorization

• XREF: This tradeoff between accuracy and trial count parallels signal-detection theory’s treatment of criterion placement and measurement efficiency.