Enhancing interaural-delay-based extents of laterality at high frequencies by using "transposed stimuli"

J Acoust Soc Am. 2003 Jun;113(6):3335-47. doi: 10.1121/1.1570431.

Abstract

An acoustic pointing task was used to determine whether interaural temporal disparities (ITDs) conveyed by high-frequency "transposed" stimuli would produce larger extents of laterality than ITDs conveyed by bands of high-frequency Gaussian noise. The envelopes of transposed stimuli are designed to provide high-frequency channels with information similar to that conveyed by the waveforms of low-frequency stimuli. Lateralization was measured for low-frequency Gaussian noises, the same noises transposed to 4 kHz, and high-frequency Gaussian bands of noise centered at 4 kHz. Extents of laterality obtained with the transposed stimuli were greater than those obtained with bands of Gaussian noise centered at 4 kHz and, in some cases, were equivalent to those obtained with low-frequency stimuli. In a second experiment, the general effects on lateral position produced by imposed combinations of bandwidth, ITD, and interaural phase disparities (IPDs) on low-frequency stimuli remained when those stimuli were transposed to 4 kHz. Overall, the data were fairly well accounted for by a model that computes the cross-correlation subsequent to known stages of peripheral auditory processing augmented by low-pass filtering of the envelopes within the high-frequency channels of each ear.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Dichotic Listening Tests*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Loudness Perception
  • Male
  • Models, Statistical
  • Normal Distribution
  • Perceptual Distortion
  • Perceptual Masking*
  • Pitch Discrimination*
  • Reaction Time*
  • Signal Detection, Psychological
  • Sound Localization
  • Sound Spectrography
  • Statistics as Topic