Detecção e discriminação de estímulos auditivos de aproximação e afastamento

Abstract

The world is full of objects and events that generate sounds, images, flavors, odors, textures, movements, among others, and which may or may not be felt and perceived by individuals. An evolutionarily important factor is the perception of movement, as well as the ability to detect the position, direction and speed of possible prey or predators, resulting in a significant adaptive advantage. Hearing is one of the main senses for differentiating sound characteristics, which are characterized by phenomena that produce pressure waves reproduced in any medium capable of propagating them. Looming sounds tend to have preference over receding sounds, promoting faster and more accurate responses. The present work aimed to investigate the auditory processing of directed sounds and a possible advantage in the response efficiency elicited by looming sounds. For this purpose, four experiments were performed. in which the first and second (1A and 1B) aimed to evaluate the results found in the literature on the detection of auditory stimuli with the participation of 24 and 21 participants, respectively, of both sexes. The experiment 2A used the Signal-detection theory (SDT) to analyze a possible advantage in detecting looming sounds over receding sounds. This experiment had 16 participants. Lastly, Experiment 2 B aimed to replicate the third experiment by adding the static stimulus (without direction), seeking to compare the auditory movement stimuli to the immovable stimulus, the experiment had 32 participants. The obtained results confirmed the initial hypothesis in which the looming sound presents greater response advantage in comparison to the receding sound.