C. Stecker - Temporal weighting of auditory spatial cues

 
Understanding the auditory scene requires that spatial information be extracted from and combined across multiple acoustic cues, such as interaural differences of time (ITD) and level (ILD). In real-world listening, the magnitude and reliability of those cues vary dynamically over the course of brief sounds, and behavioral studies suggest that listeners’ sensitivity to the cues varies accordingly. This presentation reviews several lines of investigation into the temporal dynamics of listeners’ sensitivity to ITD and ILD, and the neural mechanisms that might give rise to dynamic effects. Overall results suggest the involvement of an onset-specific mechanism in the early binaural processing of both cues, and a subsequent temporally integrative mechanism involved in ILD but not ITD processing. That difference will be discussed in terms of the weighting of spatial information across cues in complex and reverberant auditory scenes. (Supported by NIH R03 DC009482)