ABSTRACT
In addition to providing a map of the acoustic world, binaural hearing may play a role in selectivity, allowing the listener to attend to certain messages in the presence of others. Binaural detection is strongly dependent on information contained in the signal’s onset. Thus, knowledge about the direction of a source may rely more on memory than on the continual processing of ongoing information. Some questions raised by this notion are: How and when does the auditory system sample the spatial environment? How does it differentiate old, unvarying sounds from new? How does it know when a source moves in space? In this chapter, answers to these questions are discussed in the light of results which suggest that at a fairly low level in the auditory system, multiple bands are monitored for changes in level that might accompany the start of a new signal or a variation in the old one. Such changes can cause the system to resample the binaural inputs, updating its spatial map according to information present at the time of the restart.
