A Method to Study Adaptation to Left-Right Reversed Audition.

An unusual sensory space is one of the effective tools to uncover the mechanism of adaptability of humans to a novel environment. Although most of the previous studies have used special spectacles with prisms to achieve unusual spaces in the visual domain, a methodology for studying the adaptation to unusual auditory spaces has yet to be fully established. This study proposes a new protocol to set-up, validate, and use a left-right reversed stereophonic system using only wearable devices, and to study the adaptation to left-right reversed audition with the help of neuroimaging. Although individual acoustic characteristics are not yet implemented, and slight spillover of unreversed sounds is relatively uncontrollable, the constructed apparatus shows high performance in a 360° sound source localization coupled with hearing characteristics with little delay. Moreover, it looks like a mobile music player and enables a participant to focus on daily life without arousing curiosity or drawing attention of other individuals. Since the effects of adaptation were successfully detected at the perceptual, behavioral, and neural levels, it is concluded that this protocol provides a promising methodology for studying adaptation to left-right reversed audition, and is an effective tool for uncovering the adaptability of humans to a novel environments in the auditory domain.