A sex difference and learning in the discrimination of interaural-level differences but not interaural-time differences in naïve listeners

Abstract

The two primary cues to sound-source location on the horizontal plane are interaural differences in time (ITDs) and in level (ILDs). Here, we asked whether the ability to discriminate small changes in each of these interaural cues differs between the sexes. We tested males and females who had no prior experience with any psychoacoustic task on either ILD discrimination at 4 kHz or ITD discrimination at 0.5 kHz. For ILD discrimination, the overall mean threshold, as well as the threshold for each 50-trial block, was significantly lower for males (n = 80) than for females (n = 166). Both males and females learned over the course of testing, but there was no sex difference in learning rate. In contrast, for ITD discrimination, thresholds did not differ significantly between the sexes for the overall mean or for any block (n = 43M/94F). There also was no learning across blocks for either group. For both tasks, the individual thresholds spanned a wide range in each group. The presence of sex differences and learning for ILD but not ITD discrimination suggests that the factors responsible for these outcomes influenced a relatively peripheral ILD-specific pathway, and not an ITD-specific pathway, or a more central locus that is not cue specific.