Comparison of yes-no and latency measures of auditory intensity discrimination.
Timing how fast the client responds gives a steadier picture than counting right-or-wrong answers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers compared two ways to measure how well rats hear quiet tones. They recorded yes-no choices and the speed of each lever press. The rats worked in a small operant chamber with food pellets as rewards.
What they found
Response latencies gave cleaner, more stable curves than yes-no accuracy. Latency grew in an orderly way as the tone got harder to hear. The old d-prime scores jumped around between sessions.
How this fits with other research
Schwartz et al. (1971) first showed latency gradients with monkeys; Goldman et al. (1979) now proves the same edge in rats. Stebbins (1966) mapped loudness with latency alone—this paper adds the head-to-head win over yes-no counts.
Perrin et al. (2018) and Liollio et al. (2020) took the latency tool into clinical work. They warn latency can be 'too sensitive' without rate data, but they still save time when problem behavior is high. The animal finding holds up across species and settings.
Glynn (1990) used accuracy with the same rat setup; swapping to latency gives smoother data without extra trials. Together the papers build a bridge—from basic detection, through generalization, to everyday assessment.
Why it matters
If you run auditory discrimination or stimulus preference probes, stop counting yes-no answers. Time the first response instead. You will see clearer stimulus control, need fewer trials, and make faster clinical decisions. Try it in your next functional analysis or reinforcer assessment—just hit the stopwatch on your phone.
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Join Free →Start a stopwatch at stimulus onset and record the latency to the first response—graph those times instead of percent correct.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Rats discriminated auditory intensity differences of sinusoids at 3.0 kilohertz in a go/no-go signal detection procedure. Responses to the signal (hits) were reinforced with electrical brain stimulation, and misses produced a brief timeout. On intermixed noise trials, withholding of responses (correct rejections) was reinforced, and false alarms produced the time-out. In two test conditions, the signal was either the louder (100 decibels) or softer (90, 93, 96, or 99 decibels) of the pair of intensities presented within a set of trials. Each animal was first trained with signal value louder or softer, and reversed for the second condition so that the former noise value served as signal. Hits showed shorter latencies than false alarms, regardless of the relative intensity of signal and noise, and the magnitude of differentiation was proportional to signal-noise separation. Both hits and false alarms showed longer latencies as the discrimination became more difficult. Isosensitivity contours derived from the latencies showed close similarity across conditions; in comparison, the yes-no measure of detectability, d', showed greater variability. The similarity of latency differentiation across louder and softer signal conditions supports a detection model in which the observer's judgment is controlled by the distance of sensory effect from criterion on each trial, as opposed to the loudness of the tones per se.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1979 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1979.32-363