Short-term learning effect in different psychoacoustic measures

Background: Learning effect has been studied in the literature, but the learning done in short-term training has not been studied. Also, to date, the learning effect of different psychoacoustic measures has not been compared. In the current study, we compared the perceptual learning effect caused by performing four different auditory temporal processing (ATP) tasks in a short-term training design including two training sessions. Methods: A total of 74 young, normal-hearing participants each performed one of the following tasks: spectral temporal order judgment (TOJ), dichotic TOJ, gap detection, or duration discrimination. Each task was performed in two consecutive sessions. Results: A learning effect was observed only for the spectral TOJ task. The change from the first to the second session was larger in spectral TOJ (81%) than in dichotic TOJ (2%), gap detection (7%), and duration discrimination (5%). Conclusions: The difference in perceptual learning between spectral TOJ and other ATP tasks suggests that the performance of this task involves other cue(s) in addition to the temporal one.