Abstract
One of the primary functions of the sensory nervous system is to determine and represent where stimuli originate from. This is critical for identifying predators and prey, as well as mate selection and attending objects of interest. Audition is one of the three primary senses that can provide some information about extrapersonal space, together with vision and olfaction. The latter two sensory systems define the range of spatial localization abilities, with olfactory spatial perception being extremely poor under most naturalistic conditions (Doty, 2001; Kauer & White, 2001), and visual spatial perception being very accurate (Westheimer, 1984; Shapley & Lennie, 1985). Auditory spatial perception is somewhere in between (Blauert, 1997), but holds a significant advantage over vision in that it is sensitive to all regions of extrapersonal space, not just the visual field, which is restricted to frontal space in most primates.
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Recanzone, G.H. (2013). The Role of Auditory Cortex in Spatial Processing. In: Cohen, Y., Popper, A., Fay, R. (eds) Neural Correlates of Auditory Cognition. Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, vol 45. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2350-8_4
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