Accounting for a wide variety of binaural detection data by combining cross-correlation and signal-detection theory approaches

Abstract

We will discuss several experimental contexts in which a Theory of Signal Detection (TSD) approach to modeling has yielded successful, straightforward, and intuitively appealing accounts of data concerning binaural auditory processing. The primary focus will be on recently published empirical data and quantitative modeling from our laboratory. Those reports demonstrate that data obtained in binaural detection experiments conducted across the last five decades can be accounted for by combining a signal-detection-based decision variable with a cross-correlation-based model of binaural processing that incorporates stages of peripheral auditory processing. Notably, some of the data obtained in those experiments had, therefore, been “problematic” in that they had remained either theoretically unaccounted for or, at best, had been only accounted for via ad hoc approaches. Key to developing the unified account of those experimental results was the calculation and inclusion of the variability of the interaural co...