Where did that sound come from? | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The human brain is finely tuned not only to recognize particular sounds, but also to determine which direction they came from. By comparing differences in sounds that reach the right and left ear, the brain can estimate the location of a barking dog, wailing fire engine, or approaching car.

MIT neuroscientists have now developed a computer model that can also perform that complex task. The model, which consists of several convolutional neural networks, not only performs the task as well as humans do, it also struggles in the same ways that humans do.

“We now have a model that can actually localize sounds in the real world,” says Josh McDermott, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a

member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “And when we treated the model like a human experimental participant and simulated this large set of experiments that people had tested humans on in the past, what we found over and over again is it the model recapitulates the results that you see in humans.”

Findings from the new study also suggest that humans’ ability to perceive location is adapted to the specific challenges of our environment, says McDermott, who is also a member of MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

McDermott is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Human Behavior. The paper’s lead author is MIT graduate student Andrew Francl.