Effects of sex and age on auditory spatial scene analysis

Recently, it has been demonstrated that men outperform women in spatial analysis of complex auditory scenes (Zündorf et al., 2011). The present study investigated the relation between the effects of ageing and sex on the spatial segregation of concurrent sounds in younger and middle-aged adults. The experimental design allowed simultaneous presentation of target and distractor sound sources at different locations. The resulting spatial "pulling" effect (that is, the bias of target localization toward that of the distractor) was used as a measure of performance. The pulling effect was stronger in middle-aged than younger subjects, and female than male subjects. This indicates lower performance of the middle-aged women in the sensory and attentional mechanisms extracting spatial information about the acoustic event of interest from the auditory scene than both younger and male subjects. Moreover, age-specific differences were most prominent for conditions with targets in right hemispace and distractors in left hemispace, suggesting bilateral asymmetries underlying the effect of ageing.