The fine structure of the recovering auditory detection threshold.

Detection thresholds were gathered for a 2 kHz Gaussian-shaped probe (standard deviation = 0.5 ms), centered at intervals of as little as half a millisecond over 0-30 ms following a 200 ms, 97 dB SPL, 2 kHz tone. Surprisingly, there were small, sudden rises and falls superimposed on each subject's generally smooth recovery. Even more obvious were nonmonotonicities in the standard deviation of the cumulative normal fitted to each threshold's psychometric function.