Miscellanea: A Note on Binaural Fusion

It is a psychological commonplace to say that information coming from one eye m be fused with different information from the other eye to give a single visual wor I n hearing, however, i t is usual for the stimuli reaching the two ears to be closely simil; Differences in intensity or time of arrival a t the ears may indeed produce a perception localisation (Stevens & Sewman, 1936) or the rather different precedeiice effect used stereophonic reproduction (Wallach, Xewman & Rosenzweig, 1949) ; but there is lit reported comparable to, say, the filling up of the blind spot in one eye by informati received through the other. The tendency of recent research has been in fact (Cheri 1953 ; Broadbent, 1954 j to emphasise the cases in which, when different stimuli arri a t the two ears, the information on one ear is lost more or less conipletely while the otl ear controls response. The writer observed recently, however, that if a speaking voice is heard through t head-phones, with a filter eliminating the low frequency components on one ear a another eliminating the high frequeiicy components on the other ear, a considerable degi of fusion is found. Eighteen research workers have been used as observers, four of thc being previously aware of the nature of the stimulns.