Temporal weighting of binaural cues in real rooms: Psychophysical and neural modeling

Although interaural time and level differences (ITD and ILD) comprise the primary cues to sound location in azimuth, both are distorted by echoes and reverberation in many real environments. Consequently, the “effective” cues exhibit complexities and evolve temporally due to interactions of direct and reflected sound. One approach to studying the perceptual effects of such distortions is to measure the relative influence, or “temporal weight,” of cues contained within brief temporal segments of sound on spatial judgments made by human listeners. Temporal weighting functions (TWFs) measured in this way reveal binaural sensitivity to be temporally nonuniform and cue-specific. For many sounds (tones and high-rate click trains), judgments appear dominated by the ITD and ILD occurring at sound onset and the ILD occurring near sound offset, while middle portions contribute very little, consistent with expectations about the temporal statistics of these cues in real rooms. In this presentation, psychophysically ...