Auditory motion perception: Investigating the limits of spatial hearing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A major challenge to the auditory system is tracking moving sound sources in complex auditory scenes to predict future paths (e.g., an approaching car). Many psychoacoustic thresholds for moving sounds have not yet been studied, largely due to technical limitations. Current studies are mainly on static or slow-moving sounds in simplistic setups. Existing research on faster moving sounds has shown that listeners lose the sense of direction of circular motion at velocities up to around 2.5 rotations per second with white noise, due to degraded front/back discrimination. We have conducted two studies on auditory thresholds based on this upper limit: the first relating to the perception of revolving sounds at velocities well above the upper limit, and the second to the effect of a static distractor on the perception of a revolving sound. The first study explores the perception of sounds at extremely high velocities, where a sense of direction re-emerges. This creates what can be described informally as the auditory equivalent to the wagon-wheel effect: the sound appears to move in one direction when the velocity is below the fundamental frequency of the revolving sound, and it appears to move in the opposite direction when the velocity is above the fundamental frequency of the sound. The second study explores the ability to track moving sound in the presence of a static distractor by manipulating its spatial position and spectral content. We found that regardless of the spatial position of the distractor, if it energetically masks the relevant frequencies of the moving sounds’ spectra, it effectively hinders motion direction discrimination for a revolving sound. Additionally, we found that there is no effect of the presence of the distractor per se under our conditions, excluding the possibility of informational masking. By establishing these thresholds, we gain insights on the limitations of the auditory system in more complex setups than those currently established in the literature of moving sound perception. Our results lay the ground for future advances toward a better understanding of multiple auditory object tracking, and more generally, perception in complex auditory scenes
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".