The Biological Basis of Audition

Interest has recently surged in the neural mechanisms of audition, particularly with regard to functional imaging studies in human subjects. This review emphasizes recent work on two aspects of auditory processing. The first explores auditory spatial processing and the role of the auditory cortex in both nonhuman primates and human subjects. The interactions with visual stimuli, the ventriloquism effect, and the ventriloquism aftereffect are also reviewed. The second aspect is temporal processing. Studies investigating temporal integration, forward masking, and gap detection are reviewed, as well as examples from the birdsong system and echolocating bats.