The Effects of Visual Cues and Interstimulus Interval on Accuracy in Auditory Localization and Detection

Abstract

Auditory localization is an increasingly important topic as the technology for audio displays is becoming more available. However, few studies examine the effects of multiple simultaneous distracters on auditory detection and localization performance. Previous research has found that detection and localization performance significantly drop as the number of distracters increases; however, it is not clear what causes these errors. In the present study, participants either had to localize an auditory stimulus or detect an auditory stimulus among multiple distracters. Similar to previous research the number of errors significantly increased as the number of active speakers increased. Also consistent with previous research, the detection performance was better than the localization performance. The use of visual cues was found to benefit the localization group but did not significantly affect performance in the detection group. The present study also found that a longer interstimulus interval improved accuracy only in the localization group, and then only when visual cues were present. These findings provide insight into the complex nature of the auditory search task.