Auditory spatial alternation transforms auditory time (again): comments on Lakatos (1993), "Temporal constraints on apparent motion in auditory space".

Lakatos (1993) reported interesting data that indeed support "the hypothesis that the extent of spatial separation between successive sound events directly affects the perception of time intervals between these events" (p. 139). The present comment is an attempt to show that, as far as the horizontal plane is concerned, Lakatos's hypothesis was already answered qualitatively by Axelrod and coworkers (Axelrod & Guzy, 1968; Axelrod, Guzy, & Diamond, 1968) in their studies of attention shifting, and by ten Hoopen and coworkers, who quantified the amount of "interaural time dilation" (Akerboom, ten Hoopen, Olierook, & van der Schaaf, 1983; ten Hoopen, 1982; ten Hoopen, Vos, & Dispa, 1982). Nonetheless, Lakatos's study is very worthwhile. It originated from the realm of "apparent motion paradigms," but I will argue that the study rather used an "auditory streaming paradigm," and that the data is a welcome contribution to elucidate how the perceptual processes of auditory stream formation and interaural time dilation interact.