Effects of Decision Variables on Stimulus Dominance in Dichotic Listening

Stimulus dominance occurs when one member of a dichotic pair is identified more accurately than the other member. The contribution that attentional factors, listener biases, and other nonsensory variables make to stimulus dominance was assessed by comparison of scores obtained in a conventional two-ear monitoring task with scores obtained in a yes/no target-monitoring task. The target-monitoring paradigm is an application of signal detection theory to dichotic listening that allows calculation of d', a measure of perceptual sensitivity. Patterns of dominance for the two paradigms were very similar, which indicates that nonsensory factors had little influence in determining those patterns.