A recency effect in sound localization?

Abstract

In a free-field pointing task, listeners localized trains of 4-32 spatially distributed Gabor clicks ͑narrowband impulses͒ centered at 4-kHz carrier frequency and repeating at an interval of 5 ms. Multiple regression coefficients estimated the perceptual "weight" applied to each click in a train during location judgments. Temporal weighting functions obtained in this way exhibited two key features: onset dominance, as evidenced by high weight on the initial click, and "upweighting" of late-arriving sound, as evidenced by weights that gradually increased over the duration of each click-train. Across all tested click-train durations, and despite randomly varying the durations from trial to trial, the greatest post-onset weights were consistently found for clicks at or near the offset. The results imply a special importance of late-arriving sound rather than feedforward recovery from onset dominance, and are broadly consistent with recency effects resulting from temporal integration.

Onset- and offset-specific effects in interaural level difference discrimination

“…Specifically, the current results lend further support to Stecker and Hafter's (2009) suggestion that while both envelope ITD and ILD are processed by one mechanism that is strongly onset-dominated at high rates, ILD is additionally processed via a separate temporally integrative mechanism that gives increased sensitivity to ILD near sound offsets. Although maintained sensitivity to ILD after sound onset was also demonstrated by Brown and Stecker (2010)-the average ILD of stimuli in that study were found to be more predictive of subjects' lateralization responses than the onset ILD alone-TWFs measured by Brown and Stecker (2010) did not indicate greater weighting of ILD carried by late-arriving than interior clicks.…”

“…Whereas TWFs estimated by Saberi (1996) for ITD and Brown and Stecker (2010) for ITD and ILD discrimination demonstrated uniformly low weighting of post-onset clicks, TWFs estimated for freefield localization by Stecker and Hafter (2002) appeared in many cases to be "U-shaped," favoring the last few clicks in a train in addition to the onset. Stecker and Hafter (2009) further demonstrated this upweighting effect to be a monotonic increase in weights toward the end of the train, consistent with leaky temporal integration (cf. Tobias and Zerlin, 1959) rather than an effect of sound offset per se.…”

“…The U-shaped temporal weighting of ILD exhibits both onset dominance and upweighting, which presumably reflect different aspects of binaural processing (Stecker and Hafter, 2009). …”

Making Choices While Smelling, Tasting, and Listening: The Role of Sensory (Dis)similarity When Sequentially Sampling Products

“…This phenomenon occurs primarily because each sensory cue is processed in sensory-specific areas of the brain (Driver and Noesselt 2008); therefore, over time or with additional sensory cue inputs, the traces associated with the earlier sensory cues fade (Engel and Andrieux 2010;Graziano and Sigman 2008;Zylberberg et al 2009). As a result, this stream of research has suggested that recency effects will be present, resulting in preference for the last sampled product in a sequence (Stecker andHafter 2009). For example, Biswas, Grewal, andRoggeveen (2010) find that when sampling a sequence of experiential products, consumers have more vivid recall of the experience associated with the item sampled last.…”

The function of offset neurons in auditory information processing

“…Besides what we refer to above, it also reported that offset (or onset-offset) neurons are correlated with the motion of a sound source [129,130], the detection of interaural phase disparity [131,132], recognition of bats' communication calls [96], as well as the acoustic startle reflex [133]. …”