MRC01
Major Contributor
Direct perception is immediate; the listener accesses his acuity instantaneously as he listens to music! How exactly he can remember this and compare that memory with another perception is a different skill. Testing relies on this skill. If this weren't true, people would not improve their listening acuity with training. But they do! Training can't make your listening acuity any better from a biological perspective; your ears don't change. It improves your brain's ability to interpret, organize, understand and remember what you're hearing. And we know that hearing differences means comparing what we directly perceive with the memory of a prior perception. We also know that sub-second delays measurably impair that memory, even with the most skilled, sensitive trained listeners.And how would a listener have access to this additional acuity except in such testing? ... You posit since it all relies on some memory someone could be hearing something that is below the testing to detect which leads to a false negative. But under what circumstances could this be accessible to the perception of a listener?
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From this it follows that inherent acuity thresholds must be lower than thresholds measured in testing. I don't know why this seems so controversial. Indeed, the purpose of training is to shrink the difference between these thresholds, so researchers implicitly acknowledge this difference. All it says is that blind audio tests are imperfect; like all tests, they have sensitivity limitations, which means actual acuity exceeds tested acuity. We don't know by how much, because we can't detect false negatives.