Failure to find asymmetry in auditory gap detection

Several previous studies have demonstrated a right ear advantage in the detection of a brief silent gap in a broadband noise, with one study indicating that such an asymmetry does not exist. If such an asymmetry reflects more efficient temporal processing of auditory stimuli in the left hemisphere of the brain, then an asymmetry may be expected to exist regardless of the experimental procedure. Three sequential studies are summarised that use both adaptive threshold measurements and yes/no procedures to assess auditory gap detection performance both with and without the presence of a dichotic masker. These studies fail to reveal any systematic bias in performance towards one ear, and it is suggested that the right ear advantage demonstrated in previous studies may not reflect auditory gap detection performance per se, but may reflect the participants' response bias in the particular type of tasks used.