Dissociating sensitivity from bias in the Mini Profile of Music Perception Skills

Abstract

The Mini Profile of Music Perception Skills (Mini-PROMS) is a rapid performance-based measure of musical perceptual competence. The present study was designed to determine the optimal way to evaluate and score the Mini-PROMS results. Two traditional methods for scoring the Mini-PROMS, the weighted composite score and the parametric sensitivity index (d′), were compared with nonparametric alternatives, also derived from signal detection theory. Performance estimates using the traditional methods were found to depend on response bias (e.g., confidence), making them suboptimal. The simple nonparametric alternatives provided unbiased and reliable performance estimates from the Mini-PROMS and are therefore recommended instead.