The Relationship between Reaction Time and Intensity in Discrete Auditory Tasks

Abstract

The effect of signal intensity upon reaction time (RT) was studied in three auditory RT tasks in which the signal was a tone of high or low frequency. Experiment I showed the well-known negative gradient with intensity of simple RT when the subject was instructed to ignore the frequency and give the same response to both tones. But when the subject had to discriminate the frequency in a choice RT task, the RT/intensity relationship appeared to be U-shaped. Experiment II showed that when the subject was required to make a response to one signal but withhold it for the other, a task which requires discrimination of the frequency of the tone but removes the necessity to choose between overt responses, no increase in RT at high intensities was obtained. The results indicate that it is the response choice stage rather than the stimulus encoding stage which is retarded at higher energy levels. Experiment I also demonstrated that visual and auditory leading signals have similar facilitating effects without affecting the RT/intensity relationships.