Estimates of decision weights and internal noise in the masked discrimination of vowels by young and elderly adults

Abstract

Gilbertson and Lutfi [(2014). Hear. Res. 317, 9–14] report that older adults perform similarly to younger adults on a masked vowel discrimination task when the fundamental frequency (F0) of target and masker vowel differ but that the older adults perform more poorly when the F0 is the same. This paper presents an alternative analysis of those data to support the conclusion that the poorer performance of older adults is due to an increase in the decision weight on masker reflecting poorer selective attention in noise of older adults.