Hearing thresholds during Gz acceleration with masking noise.

BACKGROUND: Future fighter aircraft will include three-dimensional sound signals as part of the human-machine interface. The reduction in cerebral vascular flow associated with maneuvering acceleration (+Gz) may affect a pilot's ability to perceive and interpret such aural cues. We hypothesized that vascular deprivation along the cochlea produced by +Gz would raise hearing thresholds either globally or specifically at 1000 Hz. METHODS: We compared hearing thresholds for pure tones at 250, 1000, 6000 and 10,000 Hz during exposure to +1 Gz vs. +4 Gz. Experiments were conducted with steady noise input to the earphones to mask centrifuge noise. RESULTS: Paradoxically the hearing threshold was slightly yet significantly reduced for 1000 Hz (53 dB at 1 G vs. 47 dB at 4 G) while remaining unchanged at other frequencies. DISCUSSION: Audition did not change at +4 Gz, contradicting our hypothesis. We infer that the change at 1000 Hz is not a central effect, but instead represents a disturbance of middle ear transmission mechanisms. The absence of any general hearing loss at +4 Gz favors the possibility of using complex sounds such as three-dimensional sound in aeronautical human-machine interfaces during acceleration.

Spatial variations of visual-auditory fusion areas.

The tolerance to spatial disparity between two synchronous visual and auditory components of a bimodal stimulus has been investigated in order to assess their respective contributions to perceptual fusion. The visual and auditory systems each have specific information-processing mechanisms, and provide different cues for scene perception, with the respective dominance of space for vision and of time for hearing. A broadband noise burst and a spot of light, 500 ms in duration, have been simultaneously presented to participants who had to judge whether these cues referred to a single spatial event. We examined the influence of (i) the range and the direction of spatial disparity between the visual and auditory components of a stimulation and (ii) the eccentricity of the bimodal stimulus in the observer's perceptual field. Size and shape properties of visual-auditory fusion areas have been determined in two dimensions. The greater the eccentricity within the perceptual field, the greater the dimension of these areas; however, this increase in size also depends on whether the direction of the disparity is vertical or horizontal. Furthermore, the relative location of visual and auditory signals significantly modifies the perception of unity in the vertical plane. The shape of the fusion areas, their variation in the field, and the perceptual result associated with the relative location of the visual and auditory components of the stimulus, concur towards a strong contribution of audition to visual-auditory fusion. The spatial ambiguity of the localisation capabilities of the auditory system may play a more essential role than accurate visual resolution in determining fusion.