QWeight NH: Binaural Cue Reweighting in Normal Hearing

Subproject of QWeight

Duration: Jan 2018 - June 2022

Funding:

• uni:docs Fellowship Program for Doctoral Candidates of the University of Vienna
• OeAD, project SpaCI (#MULT_DR 11/2017)

Co-operation partners:

Norbert Kopčo, Perception and Cognition Lab, Institute of Computer Science, Safarik University, Košice, Slovakia & Hearing Research Center, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University

Objective: 

Normal-hearing listeners adapt to alterations in sound localization cues. This adaptation can result from the establishment of a new spatial map of the altered cues or from a stronger relative weighting of unaltered compared to altered cues. Such reweighting has been shown for monaural vs. binaural cues. However, studies attempting to reweight the two binaural cues, interaural differences in time (ITD) and level (ILD), yielded inconclusive results. This study investigated whether binaural-cue reweighting can be induced by lateralization training in a virtual audio-visual environment.