Abstract
Recent evidence, in early blinds individuals, supports the idea that the visual modality might be fundamental to calibrate the complex auditory space perception (Gori et al. 2014). Here we examined in blindfolded sighted participants whether the observation of the room, in which they are immersed, improve complex auditory accuracy. We asked two groups of blindfolded sighted participants to perform two tasks which require different skills: auditory spatial bisection and spatial discrimination. The first group performed the tasks in an anechoic chamber, the first time without the possibility to see the room; the second time, after the room was visually inspected. The second group followed the same procedure, but the tasks were performed in a normal room. The accuracy of responses in both tasks in the anechoic chamber was the same before and after seeing the room. Interestingly, the second group had an improvement of bisection accuracy, but not in the discrimination accuracy, after seeing the normal room. These evidence suggests that the visual system aids the auditory system to exploit spatial knowledge of the room when localizing complex sounds.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015