The effect of interleaved filters on normal hearing listeners’ perception of binaural cues

OBJECTIVES Hearing-impaired individuals often have difficulty in noisy environments. Interleaved filters, where signals from neighboring frequency regions are sent to opposite ears, may benefit those individuals but may also reduce the benefits of spatial cues. This study investigated the effect of interleaved filters on the use of spatial cues. DESIGN Normal-hearing subjects' sound localization abilities were tested with and without interleaved filters. RESULTS Participants' localization performance was worse with interleaved filters but better than chance. Interleaving in high-frequency regions primarily affected interaural level difference cues, and interleaving in low-frequency regions primarily affected interaural time difference cues. CONCLUSIONS Interleaved filters reduced but did not eliminate the benefits of spatial cues. The effect was dependent on the frequency region they were used in, indicating that it may be possible to use interleaved filters in a subset of frequency regions to selectively preserve different binaural cues.