Individual differences in auditory capabilities. I.

Twenty-eight audiometrically normal adult listeners were given a variety of auditory tests, ranging from quiet and masked thresholds through the discrimination of simple and moderately complex temporal patterns. Test-retest reliability was good. Individual differences persisted on a variety of psychoacoustic tasks following a period of training using adaptive threshold-tracking methods, and with trial-by-trial feedback. Large individual differences in performance on temporal-sequence-discrimination tasks suggest that this form of temporal processing may be of clinical significance. In addition, high correlations were obtained within given classes of tests (as, between all tests of frequency discrimination) and between certain classes of tests (as, between tests of frequency discrimination and those of sequence discrimination). Patterns of individual differences were found which support the conclusion that individual differences in auditory performance are, in part, a function of patterns of independent abilities.