The role of high-frequency cues for spatial hearing in rooms

The ability to attend to a sound source of interest while ignoring competing sounds is vital to navigating everyday acoustic scenes. Commonly, this ability depends on the ability to focus on a sound source using acoustic spatial cues, particularly interaural time differences (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs). Based on past studies of localization in anechoic settings, low-frequency ITDs have been thought to dominate perception of source location. However, reverberant environments differentially degrade ITDs and ILDs, which may affect their relative influence on localization. Moreover, a recent study suggests that ILDs play a bigger role on spatial perception in reverberant settings than in anechoic settings. Here, in a series of localization and spatial attention experiments using high-pass, low-pass and broadband sounds, we tested the hypothesis that high-frequency ILD and envelope ITD cues are important for spatial judgments in reverberant rooms. We also measured the brainstem frequency fol...