View article

The auditory system infers the location of sound sources from the processing of different acoustic cues. As the size of the head and the shape of the ears change over development, the association between acoustic cues and our expectation of external spatial position can not be fixed at birth, but has to be plastic. Two female and four male students aged 26-3 2 years with no history of hearing disorder or neurological disease, participated as paid volunteers, after having given informed consent. The experimental procedures were approved by the local ethics committee. During a sound localization run, each location was pseudo-randomly presented five times, for a total of 125 trials per run. No feedback was given. At the beginning of a run, the listener was asked to seat and lean his neck on a neck rest, so that his head was centered and that the laser pointed the central speaker.