Freigang Claudia, Richter Nicole, Rübsamen Rudolf, Ludwig Alexandra A
Faculty of Bioscience, Pharmacy and Psychology, University of Leipzig, Talstrasse 33, 04103, Leipzig, Germany,
Cell Tissue Res. 2015 Jul;361(1):371-86. doi: 10.1007/s00441-015-2230-8. Epub 2015 Jun 16.
Auditory spatial processing is an important ability in everyday life and allows the processing of omnidirectional information. In this review, we report and compare data from psychoacoustic and electrophysiological experiments on sound localisation accuracy and auditory spatial discrimination in infants, children, and young and older adults. The ability to process auditory spatial information changes over lifetime: the perception of the acoustic space develops from an initially imprecise representation in infants and young children to a concise representation of spatial positions in young adults and the respective performance declines again in older adults. Localisation accuracy shows a strong deterioration in older adults, presumably due to declined processing of binaural temporal and monaural spectro-temporal cues. When compared to young adults, the thresholds for spatial discrimination were strongly elevated both in young children and older adults. Despite the consistency of the measured values the underlying causes for the impaired performance might be different: (1) the effect is due to reduced cognitive processing ability and is thus task-related; (2) the effect is due to reduced information about the auditory space and caused by declined processing in auditory brain stem circuits; and (3) the auditory space processing regime in young children is still undergoing developmental changes and the interrelation with spatial visual processing is not yet established. In conclusion, we argue that for studying auditory space processing over the life course, it is beneficial to investigate spatial discrimination ability instead of localisation accuracy because it more reliably indicates changes in the processing ability.
听觉空间处理是日常生活中的一项重要能力，它能够处理全方位的信息。在本综述中，我们报告并比较了来自心理声学和电生理实验的数据，这些实验涉及婴儿、儿童以及青年和老年成年人的声音定位准确性和听觉空间辨别能力。处理听觉空间信息的能力在一生中会发生变化：对声学空间的感知从婴儿和幼儿时期最初不准确的表征发展为青年成年人对空间位置的精确表征，而在老年人中相应的表现又会再次下降。老年人的定位准确性明显下降，这可能是由于双耳时间和单耳频谱时间线索的处理能力下降所致。与青年成年人相比，幼儿和老年人的空间辨别阈值都大幅提高。尽管测量值具有一致性，但表现受损的潜在原因可能不同：（1）这种影响是由于认知处理能力下降，因此与任务相关；（2）这种影响是由于关于听觉空间的信息减少，由听觉脑干回路处理能力下降导致；（3）幼儿的听觉空间处理机制仍在经历发育变化，与空间视觉处理的相互关系尚未建立。总之，我们认为，在研究一生中的听觉空间处理时，研究空间辨别能力而不是定位准确性是有益的，因为它能更可靠地表明处理能力的变化。
