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J Neurophysiol (November 4, 2009). doi:10.1152/jn.00793.2009
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Submitted on August 25, 2009
Revised on October 30, 2009
Accepted on October 31, 2009

Short-latency, goal-directed movements of the pinnae to sounds that produce auditory spatial illusions

Daniel J. Tollin1*, Elizabeth M McClaine2, and Tom C. T. Yin2

1 University of Colorado Health Science Center
2 University of Wisconsin

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: daniel.tollin{at}ucdenver.edu.

The precedence effect (PE) is an auditory spatial illusion whereby two identical sounds presented from two separate locations with a delay between them are perceived as a fused single sound source whose position depends on the value of the delay. By training cats using operant conditioning to look at sound sources, we have previously shown that cats experience the PE similarly to humans. For delays < 400 s, cats exhibit summing localization, the perception of a 'phantom' sound located between the sources. Consistent with localization dominance, for delays from 400 s to ~10 ms, cats orient towards the leading source location only, with little influence of the lagging source. Finally, echo threshold was reached for delays > 10 ms, where cats first began to orient to the lagging source. It has been hypothesized by some that the neural mechanisms that produce facets of the PE, like localization dominance and echo threshold, must likely occur at cortical levels. To test this hypothesis, we measured both pinnae position, which were not under any behavioral constraint, and eye position in cats and found that the pinnae orientations to stimuli that produce each of the three phases of the PE illusion was similar to the gaze responses. While both eye and pinnae movements behaved in a manner that reflected the PE, because the pinnae moved with strikingly short latencies (~30 ms), these data suggest a subcortical basis for the PE and that the cortex is not likely to be directly involved.







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