Acoustic Communication: The Precedence Effect

The acoustic modality is of paramount importance for human inter-individual communication. Consequently, the human auditory system is highly differentiated and able to perform sophisticated tasks such as the identification, recognition and segregation of concurrent sound sources in acoustically adverse conditions – e.g., in reverberant or noisy environments. To this end the different stages of the system at peripheral, sub-cortical and cortical level act in a coordinated manner. In this lecture we take the auditory Precedence Effect as an example to discuss the role of the different stages of the auditory system in complex sound-localisation tasks. Further, we consider different strategies of modelling auditory functions.