Lateralization of stimuli with independent fine-structure and envelope-based temporal disparities

Abstract

Psychoacoustic experiments were conducted to investigate the role and interaction of fine-structure and envelope-based interaural temporal disparities. A computational model for the lateralization of binaural stimuli, motivated by recent physiological findings, is suggested and evaluated against the psychoacoustic data. The model is based on the independent extraction of the interaural phase difference (IPD) from the stimulus fine-structure and envelope. Sinusoidally amplitude-modulated 1-kHz tones were used in the experiments. The lateralization from either carrier (fine-structure) or modulator (envelope) IPD was matched with an interaural level difference, revealing a nearly linear dependence for both IPD types up to 135°, independent of the modulation frequency. However, if a carrier IPD was traded with an opposed modulator IPD to produce a centered sound image, a carrier IPD of 45° required the largest opposed modulator IPD. The data could be modeled assuming a population of binaural neurons with a physiological distribution of the best IPDs clustered around 45°–50°. The model was also used to predict the perceived lateralization of previously published data. Subject-dependent differences in the perceptual salience of fine-structure and envelope cues, also reported previously, could be modeled by individual weighting coefficients for the two cues.