The Auditory System and Human Sound-Localization Behavior

The Auditory System and Human Sound-Localization Behavior provides a comprehensive account of the full action-perception cycle underlying spatial hearing. It highlights the interesting properties of the auditory system, such as its organization in azimuth and elevation coordinates. Readers will appreciate that sound localization is inherently a neuro-computational process (it needs to process on implicit and independent acoustic cues). The localization problem of which sound location gave rise to a particular sensory acoustic input cannot be uniquely solved, and therefore requires some clever strategies to cope with everyday situations. The reader is guided through the full interdisciplinary repertoire of the natural sciences: not only neurobiology, but also physics and mathematics, and current theories on sensorimotor integration (e.g. Bayesian approaches to deal with uncertain information) and neural encoding.

Autorentext
Dr. Van Opstal is a professor of Biophysics, studying sound localization behaviour of human and non-human primates, and in patients. He regards sound localization as an action-perception problem, and probes the system with fast, saccadic eye-head gaze-control paradigms, to study the very earliest correlates of the underlying neurocomputational mechanisms.

Inhalt

1. Introduction2. The nature of sound3. Linear systems analysis4. Nonlinear systems analysis5. The cochlea6. The auditory nerve7. Cues for human sound localization8. Assessing auditory spatial performance9. The gaze orienting system10. The midbrain colliculus11. Coordinate transformations in the brain12. Sound localization behavior and plasticity13. Audiovisual integration14. The Auditory System and Human Sound-Localization Behavior