The CherISH network

Project 6: Spatial hearing for the margin of safety: Investigating peripersonal space and auditory looming bias in normal-hearing adults, newborns, and cochlear implant users

Host Institution: Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Austria
The project will be conducted at the Acoustics Research Institute and DC6 will be enrolled in the PhD program of the University of Vienna (UNIVIE).

This project will investigate how spatial hearing supports threat detection and defensive behavior. Normal-hearing listeners are able to perceive the space immediately surrounding them – termed peripersonal space (PPS) – and demarcate it from distant extrapersonal space (EPS). This demarcation is important for organisms as it distinguishes between objects we can and cannot interact with at a given moment and facilitates increased multisensory integration inside PPS. The multisensory nature of PPS representation aligns also with the phenomenon of auditory looming bias, which manifests as an increased saliency of approaching auditory objects and is more effective in capturing attention when sounds are paired with tactile or visual cues. Cochlear implants (CIs) may affect both looming perception and peripersonal space representation. Is the distinction between the different portions of auditory space present or absent from CI users’ spatial representation? Does the identification of looming sounds suffer? Finally, investigating this topic in healthy newborns will allude to the potential risks of early sensory deprivation in congenitally deaf individuals and the related benefits of early implantation.

Our Partners:

• UNITN, Universta degli Study di Trento, Italy
• UT, University of Tübingen, Germany
• ICL, Imperial College London, UK
• HUN-REN, TTK Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungary