Localization in Multiple Source Environments: Localizing the Missing Source

Experience in real-world listening situations suggests that listeners, in general, have a great deal of spatial information about multiple concurrent sounds in an auditory scene. Despite this, laboratory data would suggest that listeners should operate quite poorly in such environments. This study employed environmental sounds that would naturally occur in real-world auditory environments and measured sound localization in auditory scenes containing 1, 2, 4, 6, or 8 concurrent sounds. The identifying feature of the target was that it was the only sound deleted from the multiple-source auditory scene at the end of an observation interval of a specific duration (2.5, 4.5, 6.5, or 8.5 sec). The results indicate that localization can be surprisingly good in complex auditory scenes. However, as an auditory scene becomes more complex, listeners appear to benefit from longer exposure to the scene in order to accurately judge the location of a change in the scene. [Work supported by AFOSR.] [