Trends in Hearing · Published 2026-01-01 · DOI 10.1177/23312165261465030
The dynamic interplay between source-specific spectral features and spatial cues is central to auditory inference. While sagittal-plane localization relies on direction-dependent spectral cues shaped by the listener’s anatomy, sound sources themselves introduce spectral patterns that can obscure these cues, creating an ill-posed inference problem. We tested whether listeners can mitigate that problem by statistically learning a source’s spectral shape over the short term. In a free-field localization task, participants localized ripple-spectrum sounds under two conditions: within a block, source spectra were either fixed ( predictable ) or randomized ( unpredictable ). Predictability reduced large-scale localization errors – such as front-back reversals and quadrant confusions – by up to 5% within minutes. These findings demonstrate that listeners exploit spectral consistency across stimulus history to adapt spatial decoding, providing empirical evidence for short-term updating of spectral priors and underscoring the adaptive nature of auditory inference.
Abstract from DOAJ. Public domain (CC0 1.0).
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