Do whole-body vibrations affect spatial hearing?

To assist the human operator, modern auditory interfaces increasingly rely on sound spatialisation to display auditory information and warning signals. However, we often operate in environments that apply vibrations to the whole body, e.g. when driving a vehicle. Here, we report three experiments investigating the effect of sinusoidal vibrations along the vertical axis on spatial hearing. The first was a free-field, narrow-band noise localisation experiment with 5- Hz vibration at 0.88 ms(-2). The other experiments used headphone-based sound lateralisation tasks. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of vibration frequency (4 vs. 8 Hz) at two different magnitudes (0.83 vs. 1.65 ms(-2)) on a left-right discrimination one-interval forced-choice task. Experiment 3 assessed the effect on a two-interval forced-choice location discrimination task with respect to the central and two peripheral reference locations. In spite of the broad range of methods, none of the experiments show a reliable effect of whole-body vibrations on localisation performance.

We report three experiments that used both free-field localisation and headphone lateralisation tasks to assess their sensitivity to whole-body vibrations at low frequencies. None of the experiments show a reliable effect of either frequency or magnitude of whole-body vibrations on localisation performance.