The apparent immunity of high-frequency "transposed" stimuli to low-frequency binaural interference

Discrimination of interaural temporal disparities (ITDs) was measured with either conventional or transposed "targets" centered at 4 kHz. The targets were presented either in the presence or absence of a simultaneously gated diotic noise centered at 500 Hz, the interferer. As expected, the presence of the low-frequency interferer resulted in substantially elevated threshold-ITDs for the conventional high-frequency stimuli. In contrast, these interference effects were absent for ITDs conveyed by the high-frequency transposed targets. The binaural interference effects observed with the conventional high-frequency stimuli were well accounted for, quantitatively, by the model described by Heller and Trahiotis [L. M. Heller and C. Trahiotis, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, 3632-3637 (1996)]. The lack of binaural interference effects observed with the high-frequency transposed stimuli was not predicted by that model. It is suggested that transposed stimuli may be one of a class of stimuli that do not foster an obligatory combination of binaural information between low- and high-frequency regions. Under those conditions that do foster such an obligatory combination, one could still consider models of binaural interference, such as the one described in Heller and Trahiotis, to be valid descriptors of binaural processing.