Assessment of binaural-proprioceptive interaction in human-machine interfaces

Abstract

Binaural models help to predict human localization under the assumption that a corresponding localization process is based on acoustic signals, thus, on unimodal information. However, what happens if this localization process is realized in an environment with available bimodal or even multimodal sensory input? Do we still consider the auditory modality in the localization process? Can binaural models help to predict human localization in bimodal or multimodal scenes? At the beginning, this chapter focuses on binaural-visual localization and demonstrates that binaural models are definitely required for modeling human localization even when visual information is available. The main part of this chapter dedicates to binaural-proprioceptive localization. First, an experiment is described with which the proprioceptive localization performance was quantitatively measured. Second, the influence of binaural signals on proprioception was investigated to reveal whether synthetically generated spatial sound can improve human proprioceptive localization. The results demonstrate that it is indeed possible to auditorily guide proprioception. In conclusion, binaural models can not only be used for modeling human binaural-visual, but also for modeling human binaural-proprioceptive localization. It is shown that binaural-modeling algorithms, thus, play an important role for further technical developments.