Just noticeable differences with respect to tempo

Steven Soenen

A lot of research has been conducted in the past with respect to just noticeable differences.  However, it seems that people’s sensitivity for differences in duration has not been studied profoundly yet.  Moreover, while the market for perception training programs is growing rapidly, it still is not really known at this moment whether perception can be trained and whether certain parameters can be more easily trained than others.  During my presentation, I will elaborate on a set of experiments that I conducted during my internship at the ORL section of the UZ Sint-Rafaël Leuven.  In these experiments I tested a limited number of people on their capacity to detect small differences with respect to tempo.  The outcomes  indicate that people’s performance gets better – on average –  after a couple of training sessions. The results also show the role of concentration in the whole problem.  More generally, they lay bare the human factor, put it into the spotlight and oppose it to the deterministic point of view that pretends that a rigid boundary can be traced between those differences that can be perceived and the differences that cannot be perceived any more.