THE EFFECTS OF DISPLACED EARS ON AUDITORY LOCALIZATION

Abstract

The techniques of rearrangement and disarrangement were used to alter the normal relationship between an observer and his auditory or visual environment. In general, rearrangement leads to orderly adaptation of perceptual-motor performance, while disarrangement leads to degradation of performance. This experiment was an auditory rearrangement. Subjects' judgments of auditory direction were displaced laterally by means of a high-fidelity pseudophone that effectively rotated the interaural axis through a 20 degree horizontal angle. After exposure sessions that consisted of walking repeatedly toward a fixed sound source for 20 minutes, two of the four experimental subjects demonstrated significant shifts averaging 6 degrees in their judgments of auditory direction. The shifts partially compensated for the error of localization produced by the pseudophone. The shifts in localization are discussed in terms of the nature of the exposure situation and the factors that are likely to be responsible for compensation.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 1964
Accession Number
AD0604569

Entities

People

  • Kenneth Stampfer
  • Sanford J. Freedman

Organizations

  • Tufts University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Compensation
  • Displacement
  • Earphones
  • Electrical Equipment
  • Generators
  • Intensity
  • Judgment
  • Microphones
  • Noise
  • Perception
  • Reliability
  • Rotation
  • Standards
  • United States
  • Waveform Generators
  • Waveforms

Fields of Study

  • Psychology

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Control Systems Engineering.
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.