Judgments of intensity for brief sequences

The ability to make intensity judgments for sequential stimuli was examined with an intensity-discrimination task involving three 50-ms noise bursts with non-overlapping frequency ranges. Targets (single bursts) presented in three-burst sequences were required to be as much as 5 dB more intense than targets presented as single bursts in isolation, especially for the later targets. Randomizing target position in the sequence did not reliably reduce performance, nor were thresholds for younger and older listeners reliably different. These increases in increment detection threshold are indications of a specific intensity-processing deficit for stimuli occurring later in a sequence.