Monaural spatial resolution in the horizontal plane under dynamic and static listening conditions

Abstract

Auditory spatial resolution was measured in the horizontal plane for three normal‐hearing adult subjects in a darkened anechoic chamber. In all conditions, subjects' right ears were occluded by an EAR foam insert plug plus an external sound‐attenuating muff, providing a total of about 40 dB of attenuation. In the dynamic conditions, the minimum audible movement angle (MAMA) was measured—that is, the angular extent a moving target had to traverse to be just discriminable from a stationary target. In the static conditions, the minimum audible angle (MAA) was measured—that is, the minimum angular separation between two sequentially presented stationary targets that was just discriminable from a single stationary target presented twice in succession. In general, MAMAs and MAAs decreased as stimulus bandwidth increased from 0 Hz (pure tone at 3000 Hz) to wideband. MAAs were extremely variable across and within subjects (varying from 10° to 40° of arc). MAMAs for slow‐velocity targets (10°/s) were usually lower...