Neural bases of an auditory illusion and its elimination in owls.

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.