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Updated: Jun 22, 2026
07:52
An Automated System for Sound Localization Testing in Hearing-Impaired Listeners
Published on: March 13, 2026
A recency effect in sound localization?
G Christopher Stecker1, Ervin R Hafter
1Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA. cstecker@u.washington.edu
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|June 11, 2009
Summary
Listeners showed a recency effect in sound localization, giving more perceptual weight to later sounds in a click train, suggesting temporal integration is key for accurate auditory spatial perception.
Area of Science:
- Auditory perception
- Psychoacoustics
- Spatial hearing
Background:
- Sound localization relies on integrating auditory cues over time.
- Onset dominance is a known phenomenon in auditory processing, where initial sounds receive more attention.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate temporal weighting functions in sound localization of click trains.
- To determine the perceptual importance of individual clicks within a train for spatial judgments.
Main Methods:
- Listeners performed a free-field pointing task to localize trains of Gabor clicks.
- Multiple regression analysis estimated perceptual weights for each click in the train.
- Click train durations were varied randomly across trials.
Main Results:
- Temporal weighting functions revealed onset dominance and significant upweighting of late-arriving sounds.
- The greatest post-onset weights were consistently assigned to clicks near the end of the train.
- This pattern held across various click train durations.
Conclusions:
- Late-arriving sound is crucial for accurate sound localization, challenging simple feedforward recovery models.
- The findings support a recency effect in auditory temporal integration for spatial perception.
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