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Published July 1999 | public
Journal Article

Neural bases of an auditory illusion and its elimination in owls

Abstract

Humans and owls localize sounds by detecting the arrival time disparity between the ears. Both species determine the interaural time difference by finding the delay necessary to match the leading signal with the lagging one. This method produces ambiguity with periodic signals, because the two signals can be matched by delaying either one or the other. As predicted, owls localized periodic signals in illusory directions, whereas they always perceived the real source when signal bandwidth exceeded a certain value. This bandwidth also enabled higher-order auditory neurons to discriminate between real and illusory sources.

Additional Information

© 1999 Nature America Inc. Received 26 March; Accepted 14 May 1999. This work was supported by NIH (National Institutes of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders) and a Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship (Y.T.). We thank John C. Middlebrooks, Terry Takahashi and Ervin R. Hafter for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. We also thank Roian Egnor for comments and assistance during the course of this research.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023