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Neural bases of an auditory illusion and its elimination in owls

Nature Neuroscience volume 2, pages 656–659 (1999)Cite this article

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.

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Figure 1: Localization of real and illusory sound sources by an owl.
Figure 2: Response of a tectal neuron to ITD varies with signal bandwidth.
Figure 3: Responses of tectal neurons as a function of bandwidth and ITD.
Figure 4: Relative amplitudes of responses by tectal neurons to real and phantom ITDs.

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Acknowledgements

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.

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Author notes

  1. Yoshifumi Takahashi

    Present address: Department of Otolaryngology and Sensory Organ Surgery, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, 2-2 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka, Japan

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Biology 216-76, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Kourosh Saberi, Yoshifumi Takahashi, Haleh Farahbod & Masakazu Konishi

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  1. Kourosh Saberi
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Correspondence to Kourosh Saberi.

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Saberi, K., Takahashi, Y., Farahbod, H. et al. Neural bases of an auditory illusion and its elimination in owls. Nat Neurosci 2, 656–659 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/10212

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