Localization of click trains and speech by cats: the negative level effect

Although localization of sound in elevation is believed to depend on spectral cues, it has been shown with human listeners that the temporal features of sound can also greatly affect localization performance. Of particular interest is a phenomenon known as the negative level effect, which describes the deterioration of localization ability in elevation with increasing sound level and is observed only with impulsive or short-duration sound. The present study uses the gaze positions of domestic cats as measures of perceived locations of sound targets varying in azimuth and elevation. The effects of sound level on localization in terms of accuracy, precision, and response latency were tested for sound with different temporal features, such as a click train, a single click, a continuous sound that had the same frequency spectrum of the click train, and speech segments. In agreement with previous human studies, negative level effects were only observed with click-like stimuli and only in elevation. In fact, localization of speech sounds in elevation benefited significantly when the sound level increased. Our findings indicate that the temporal continuity of a sound can affect the frequency analysis performed by the auditory system, and the variation in the frequency spectrum contained in speech sound does not interfere much with the spectral coding for its location in elevation.