The effect of whole-body tilt on sound lateralization

The effect of passive whole-body tilt in the frontal plane on the lateralization of dichotic sound was investigated in human subjects. Pure-tone pulses (1 kHz, 100 ms duration) with various interaural time differences were presented via headphones while the subject was in an upright position or tilted 45 degrees or 90 degrees to the left or right. Subjects made two-alternative forced-choice (left/right) judgements on the intracranial sound image. During body tilt, the auditory median plane of the head, computed from the resulting psychometric functions, was always shifted to the upward ear, indicating a shift of the auditory percept to the downward ear, that is, in the direction of gravitational linear acceleration. The mean maximum magnitude of the auditory shift obtained with 90 degrees body tilt was 25 micro s. On the one hand, these findings suggest a certain influence of the otolith information about body position relative to the direction of gravity on the representation of auditory space. However, in partial contradiction to previous work, which had assumed existence of a significant 'audiogravic illusion', the very slight magnitude of the present effect rather reflects the excellent stability in the neural processing of auditory spatial cues in humans. Thus, it might be misleading to use the term 'illusion' for this quite marginal effect.