The End of Localization Dominance in Humans

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Date

2008-06

Authors

Masterson, Jeff

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

University of Oregon

Abstract

Day-to-day human life requires functional sensory systems that enable us to perceive the surrounding environment. Often, the surrounding environment assessed by our sensory systems can be very complex, so that processes necessary to analyze them can become very sophisticated. The auditory pathway in the human brain is one such sensory system that is able to process very sophisticated stimuli from the environment and transform it into useful information. Echoes present a potentially complex situation for our auditory system to resolve, as multiple sound waves arriving from different locations can arrive in our ears not only directly from the sources themselves, but from nearby surfaces that reflect the direct sound waves. Despite this complexity, humans converse in echoic environments all the time and sort sounds of interest from echoes without difficulty. The current research addresses how the human auditory system accomplishes this feat. As our understanding of the auditory system grows, so too will the ability to treat defective auditory systems (i.e., through the development of more advanced hearing aids). To begin, I will discuss the manner in which the auditory system processes single sounds, and then move on to the piocessing of sounds in a complex echoic environment. 1 will then describe the results from my own experiments which will show that when a direct sound and its delayed echo overlap with each other temporally, the perception of the echo is determined by the length of time that the echo is present alone.

Description

29 pages

Keywords

Inter-aural time difference (ITD), Spatial receptive field (SRF), Lag as a Function

Citation