A study revealsmen have a hearing advantage over womenat the time ofdetect and identify the source of a sound in a noisy environment. The authors speculate that it is the result of natural selection. The findings are published in the latest issue of the journalCortex.
Ida Zündorf, from the Center for Neurology at the University of Tübingen, together with Professor Hans-Otto Karnath and Dr. Jörg Lewald, investigated the audiospatial capabilities in healthy men and women through sound localization tests. They were asked to listen to the sounds and determine the location of the sound source, either by pointing to its source or by naming the exact position: for example, 45 degrees to the left. At first, the sounds were presented one by one and the men and women achieved their goal with great precision. Later, several sounds were presented at the same time and participants had to concentrate on locating a single sound. This is known as the “party effect” – the human ability to detect and focus on a particular sound source in a noisy environment.
Interestingly, the women found the second test much more difficult compared to the men. The results suggest that men are better atauditory spatial tasks. Since this male advantage was only found in a “party setting” and not when sounds are presented one at a time, this indicates that the difference is related to a “high attention mechanism” in the brain specifically involved in extraction. of spatial information from a sound source, particularly in a noisy environment.
