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The precedence effect is a well-studied phenomenon in spatial hearing that is related to how we localize sounds accurately in everyday settings. Specifically, when two sound sources reach a listener close together in time, listeners often hear a single “fused” image whose perceived direction is near the location of the first-arriving sound.
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The Effects of Room Acoustics on Auditory Spatial Cues
The signals reaching the listener’s ears directly from a sound source convey information about the source’s location (Blauert 1997; Schnupp et al. 2010). However, in ordinary settings, soon after the direct sound reaches the listener, reflected sound arrives from random directions, coming off of walls, floors, and other reflective surfaces. This reflected sound energy adds acoustically to the direct sound before entering each ear, changing the total signal reaching the ear (e.g., see Allen and Berkley 1979). The content of this...
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References
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Shinn-Cunningham, B. (2015). Auditory Precedence Effect. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6675-8_101
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6675-8_101
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