QWeight Gene: Generalization of Binaural Cue Reweighting
Subproject of QWeight
Duration: Sept 2020 - Sept 2022
Funding:
- uni:docs Fellowship Program for Doctoral Candidates of the University of Vienna
- OeAD, project SpaCI (#MULT_DR 11/2017)
Objective:
Normal-hearing listeners primarily rely on two binaural cues, the interaural time difference (ITD) and the interaural level difference (ILD), for azimuthal sound localization. The extent to which each of these cues contributes to localization mainly depends on the frequency content of the sound: ITDs dominate at low frequencies and ILDs dominate at high frequencies. It has recently been shown that this cue weighting can be changed for mid-frequency narrow-band noise by reinforcing one of the cues during a lateralization training in a virtual audio-visual environment. However, it is unclear, whether reweighting can be induced for low or high frequency regions where ITDs or ILDs dominate perceptually. Furthermore, it is of interest whether reweighting is specific to the trained stimulus or whether it generalizes to untrained frequency regions or broadband stimuli and whether generalization is facilitated by using different frequency bands during training. This study addresses these questions by measuring binaural cue weights across a range of frequency bands, both before and after training with a subset of bands.
