PSYCHOACOUSTICS: a comprehensive MATLAB toolbox for auditory testing

Abstract

PSYCHOACOUSTICS is a new MATLAB toolbox which implements three classic adaptive procedures for auditory threshold estimation. The first includes those of the Staircase family (method of limits, simple up-down and transformed up-down); the second is the Parameter Estimation by Sequential Testing (PEST); and the third is the Maximum Likelihood Procedure (MLP). The toolbox comes with more than twenty built-in experiments each provided with the recommended (default) parameters. However, if desired, these parameters can be modified through an intuitive and user friendly graphical interface and stored for future use (no programming skills are required). Finally, PSYCHOACOUSTICS is very flexible as it comes with several signal generators and can be easily extended for any experiment.