The TFS1 test isolates temporal fine structure processing from excitation-pattern cues

Evidence

This requires discrimination of a harmonic complex tone (H) from an inharmonic tone (I), created by shifting all components in the H tone up by a fixed amount in hertz, ∆f. The value of ∆f is adaptively varied to determine the threshold. Both tones are passed through a fixed bandpass filter centred on the higher (unresolved) components, and a background noise is used to mask combination tones and components falling on the skirts of the filter. Evidence suggesting that performance on this test reflects sensitivity to TFS rather than the use of excitation-pattern cues is: (1) Performance on the TFS test does not worsen with increasing level, except when the level is very high (Moore and Sek 2009 , 2011 ; Marmel et al. 2015 ); (2) Randomizing the level of the individual components would be expected to impair the ability to use excitation-pattern cues, but this has very little effect on performance of the TFS1 test (Jackson and Moore 2014 ); (3) Differences in excitation level between the H and I tones at the threshold value of ∆f, estimated using the H and I tones as forward maskers, are too small to be usable (Marmel et al. 2015 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 796

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the TFS1 test — its logic, construction, and the three experimental validations that it genuinely measures TFS rather than spectral cues.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 796