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