An introduction to the physiological, psychological, and modeling aspects of the binaural display.

Abstract

Binaural hearing is a model system to understand behavioral outcomes through models based on physiological measurements. Internal or compensating delays are one component that is generally present in binaural models. These delays are typically modeled as a continuum of pure time delays. We will review the physiological evidence for the distribution of these delays in different mammals, their (in)dependence on stimulus parameters, and we will briefly address their possible origin. Besides in physiology, the binaural display also plays a central role in describing psychoacoustic data. In a typical model of binaural processing, the binaural display is an intermediate stage in which activity is represented as a function of the internal interaural delay, computed by a cross‐correlation process, and frequency. Such models have been applied successfully to a variety of lateralization experiments and to a great variety of binaural signal detection conditions. Besides introducing these elements of binaural models, we will also shortly address the question of whether there is a strict need for behavioral models to contain a continuous internal delay axis.