Lateralization of Huggins pitch

The Huggins pitch is a sensation of pitch generated from a broadband noise having a narrowband boundary region where the interaural phase difference varies rapidly as a function of frequency. Models of binaural hearing predict that the pitch image should be well lateralized. A direct psychophysical experimental method was used to estimate the lateral positions of Huggins pitch images with two different forms of phase boundaries, linear phase and stepped phase. A third experiment measured the lateral positions of sine tones with controlled interaural phase differences. The results showed that the lateralization of Huggins pitch stimuli was similar to that of the corresponding sine tones and that the lateralizations of the two forms of Huggins pitch phase boundaries were even more similar to one another. Both Huggins pitches and sine tones revealed strong laterality compression (exponent$≈ 0.5$⁠). Ambiguous stimuli, with an interaural phase difference of 180°, were consistently lateralized on one side or the other according to individual asymmetries—an effect called “earedness.” An appendix to this article develops a new first-order lateralization model, the salient phase density model, which combines attributes of previous models of dichotic pitch lateralization.