Effects of sex and age on auditory spatial scene analysis

Lewald, J.; Hausmann, M.

doi:10.1016/j.heares.2013.02.005

Effects of sex and age on auditory spatial scene analysis

Lewald, J.; Hausmann, M.

Authors

J. Lewald

Professor Markus Hausmann markus.hausmann@durham.ac.uk
Head of Department

Abstract

Recently, it has been demonstrated that men outperform women in spatial analysis of complex auditory scenes (Zündorf et al., 2011). The present study investigated the relation between the effects of ageing and sex on the spatial segregation of concurrent sounds in younger and middle-aged adults. The experimental design allowed simultaneous presentation of target and distractor sound sources at different locations. The resulting spatial "pulling" effect (that is, the bias of target localization toward that of the distractor) was used as a measure of performance. The pulling effect was stronger in middle-aged than younger subjects, and female than male subjects. This indicates lower performance of the middle-aged women in the sensory and attentional mechanisms extracting spatial information about the acoustic event of interest from the auditory scene than both younger and male subjects. Moreover, age-specific differences were most prominent for conditions with targets in right hemispace and distractors in left hemispace, suggesting bilateral asymmetries underlying the effect of ageing.

Citation

Lewald, J., & Hausmann, M. (2013). Effects of sex and age on auditory spatial scene analysis. Hearing Research, 299, 46-52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2013.02.005

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	May 1, 2013
Deposit Date	Feb 15, 2013
Publicly Available Date	Nov 19, 2014
Journal	Hearing Research
Print ISSN	0378-5955
Publisher	Elsevier
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	299
Pages	46-52
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2013.02.005

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Copyright Statement
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Hearing Research. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Hearing Research, 299, May 2013, 10.1016/j.heares.2013.02.005.