Effects of auditory distance cues and reverberation on spatial perception and listening strategies
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Missoni, Fulvio
Poole, Katarina C
Picinali, Lorenzo
Canessa, Andrea
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Spatial hearing—the brain’s ability to identify sound origins using auditory cues—is inherently multisensory, integrating vision, hearing, and proprioception to reduce uncertainty and support adaptive interaction with the environment. While simplified experimental paradigms have advanced our understanding, their limited ecological validity limits real-world applicability. This study investigates how listener movement, reverberation, and distance affect localisation accuracy in more naturalistic settings. Participants performed an active localisation task without prescribed listening strategies, in either anechoic or reverberant conditions. Sound sources were positioned around them in both horizontal and vertical planes, at varying distances. Results show increased head movement in reverberant environments, suggesting an adaptive response to degraded binaural cues. While distance did not influence listening strategies, it significantly affected localisation accuracy. These findings highlight the importance of considering ecological factors when studying spatial hearing and suggest that natural listener behaviour plays a key role in maintaining spatial accuracy under different reverberant conditions.
Date Issued
2025-10-13
Date Acceptance
2025-09-10
Citation
npj Acoustics, 2025, 1
ISSN
3005-141X
Publisher
Nature Research
Journal / Book Title
npj Acoustics
Volume
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2025 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
23
Date Publish Online
2025-10-13