The Effects of Visual Cues and Interstimulus Interval on Error Rates in Auditory Localization and Detection

Auditory localization is an increasingly important topic as the technology for audio displays is becoming more available. However, few studies examine the effects of multiple simultaneous distracters on auditory detection and localization performance. Previous research has found that detection and localization performance significantly drops as the number of distracters increases; however, it is not clear what causes these errors. Six loudspeakers were arranged in a semicircle, and participants either had to localize an auditory stimulus or detect an auditory stimulus among multiple distracters. Participants' response time and accuracy were recorded for each trial. The number of detection errors was equivalent between the localization and detection groups, although the localization group made significantly more errors overall. Similar to previous research, the number of errors significantly increased as the number of active speakers increased. The use of visual cues was found to benefit the localization group but did not significantly affect performance in the detection group. The present study found that a longer interstimulus interval improved accuracy in the localization group only when cues were present. Interstimulus intervals had no effect in the detection task. These findings provide insight into the complex nature of the auditory search task.