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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Perception Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1435529

Modest Sex Differences in the Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities (TBAC)

Provisionally accepted
Dennis McFadden Dennis McFadden 1*Edward G. Pasanen Edward G. Pasanen 1Gary R. Kidd Gary R. Kidd 2Charles S. Watson Charles S. Watson 2Brian Gygi Brian Gygi 2
  • 1 Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States
  • 2 Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The Test of Basic Auditory Capabilities (TBAC) consists of 19 discrimination and identification tasks selected to study individual differences in audition. In one TBAC study, performance was measured for 340 normal-hearing subjects, but no investigation into possible sex differences was undertaken. That dataset now has been re-analyzed by sex. An effect size for sex difference was calculated for each subtest, and a resampling technique was used to estimate an implied significance for each of those effect sizes. Because almost all the differences observed were small, only the basic outcomes are described here, with more detail provided in an online supplement. Peripheral physiological measures such as otoacoustic emissions exhibit larger auditory sex differences than do auditory behavioral measures, revealing that those peripheral physiological differences do not propagate simply up the auditory chain.

    Keywords: Auditory ability, individual differences, sex differences, Auditory tests, resampling, TBAC

    Received: 20 May 2024; Accepted: 20 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 McFadden, Pasanen, Kidd, Watson and Gygi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Dennis McFadden, Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States

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