Abstract
Hearing-protection devices (HPD) are critical to hearing health in hazardous noise environments, but can be detrimental to job effectiveness and safety when degrading a wearer’s sound localization accuracy. Understanding specifically how localization is disrupted by HPDs is critical for mitigating the deleterious effects of HPDs on situation awareness. This study attempts to better quantify the effects of the degradations by predicting horizontal sound localization. A 360 deg horizontal array with 10 deg between-speaker spacing is used to collect head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) and to measure localization [ANSI/ASA S3.71] for the different conditions (open-ear, passive plugs, and both passive and active muffs). Our model attempts to select the response location that was most likely to have elicited the observed stimulus for the trial, by comparing narrow-band statistics between prior knowledge (“templates”) and trial observations. Bone conduction related noise is added, and the degree to which the priors are “device-related” (i.e., based on HRTFs captured for the device) or “open ear” related is varied. Results are discussed in terms of two potential mechanisms: (1) the wrong location is chosen due to a prior/template mismatch in percent device-related and (2) multiple response locations are viable because cue variability is reduced between locations compared to within.
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