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The Role of Spatial Perception in Auditory Looming Bias: Neurobehavioral Evidence from Impossible Ears

Tobias Greif, doctoral researcher in the Hearing cluster, together with colleagues Robert Baumgartner, Roberto Barumerli, Karolina Ignatiadis, and Brigitta Tóth, investigated how the human brain processes sounds that are moving toward or away from a listener. The results indicate that the so-called “looming bias”—a perceptual preference for approaching sounds—depends on established spatial associations and cannot be triggered by acoustic features alone.

 26.08.2025
This figure is taken from the study and illustrates the experimental conditions and hypotheses. It shows how different ear filtering models were used to investigate the auditory looming bias.
© Tobias Greif

Spatial hearing enables both voluntary localization of sound sources and automatic monitoring of the surroundings. The auditory looming bias (ALB), characterized by the prioritized processing of approaching (looming) sounds over receding ones, is thought to serve as an early hazard detection mechanism. The bias could theoretically reflect an adaptation to the low-level acoustic properties of approaching sounds, or alternatively necessitate the sound to be localizable in space.

Read the full journal article in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

 Frontiers in Neuroscience