The Effect of Large Interaural Time Differences upon the Judgment of Sidedness
William A. Wilbanks, Hugh C. Blodgett, Lloyd A. Jeffress · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1954
Bands of noise presented to the two ears via earphones are perceived as lying to one side when that side leads in time. Roy Klumpp has shown that interaural time differences as small as ten microseconds can be detected. The present study is concerned with the other extreme—the largest time differences that can be heard as “sided.” The interaural time delay in the present experiments was obtained by displacing one head of a binaural tape reproducer carrying the noise. A slow acting gate turning the signal on in both channels simultaneously was used to prevent the subject's getting a cue from the onset of the signal. Results will be presented showing the effects on the threshold for sidedness, of level imbalance, of the band width and the frequency of the noise, and of individual differences. The thresholds varied from a fraction of a millisecond to about 20 milliseconds depending upon the parameters involved.