Leveraging adaptation to study perceptual weighting of interaural time differences

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2019

Abstract

An important question in auditory cognition is how we perceive the location of an object in space. Converging evidence from animal models and humans suggests that when judging sound direction, the central nervous system weighs the anticipated reliability of binaural cues. Here, we used short-term adaptation to bias normal-hearing listeners towards source direction favoring either the left or the right frontal quadrant. Listeners rated perceived laterality of tokens of band-pass filtered noise (300 Hz - 1200 Hz) with interaural time differences that were randomly selected from a uniform distribution spanning either -375 to 0 µs or 0 to 375 µs. Using non-linear mixed effects modeling of behavioral laterality reports, we tested how exposure to source quadrant affects how listeners weigh the reliability of interaural time differences. The cue reliability hypothesis predicts that perceived direction should be skewed, such that unreliable frontal source angles are more affected by short-term adaptation than the more reliable lateral source angles. Alternatively, short-term adaptation may affect all source angles equally, predicting an overall shift in perceived direction. Results show that frontal angles are more strongly affected by short-term adaptation than lateral angles, supporting the cue reliability hypothesis.

Identifier

85099330210 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9783939296157]

Publication Title

Proceedings of the International Congress on Acoustics

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.18154/RWTH-CONV-239915

e-ISSN

24151599

ISSN

22267808

First Page

8253

Last Page

8256

Volume

2019-September

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