Mechanisms determining the salience of coloration in echoed sound: influence of interaural time and level differences.
This study investigates whether the salience of the pitch associated with a single reflection of a broadband sound, such as noise, is determined by the monaural information mediated by the stimuli at the two ears, or by the relative locations of the primary sound and the reflection. Pitch strength was measured as a function of the reflection delay and the lateral displacement between the primary sound and the reflection. Thereby, lateral displacement was produced by means of interaural time differences (ITDs) in experiment 1 and interaural level differences (ILDs) in experiment 3. The results from both experiments are in accordance with the assumption that the strength of the pitch associated with a reflection is based on a central average of the internal representations of the stimuli at the two ears. This notion was corroborated by experiment 2, which showed that the results from experiment 1 could be mimicked by simply adding the stimuli from the two ears and presenting the merged stimulus identically to both ears.
Krumbholz
Katrin
K
Institute of Medicine (IME), Research Center Jülich, D-52425 Jülich, Germany. k.krumbholz@fz-juelich.de
Maresh
Kate
K
Tomlinson
Jennifer
J
Patterson
Roy D
RD
Seither-Preisler
Annemarie
A
Lütkenhöner
Bernd
B
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013997:Time Factors