Hemispheric Differences in Auditory Perception Are Similar to Those Found in Visual Perception

Abstract

In a pitch discrimination task, subjects were faster and more accurate in judging low-frequency sounds when these stimuli were presented to the left ear, compared with the right ear. In contrast, a right-ear advantage was found with high-frequency sounds. The effect was in terms of relative frequency and not absolute frequency, suggesting that the effect arises from postsensory mechanisms. A simitar laterality effect has been reported in visual perception with stimuli varying in spatial frequency. These multimodal laterality effects may reflect a general computational difference between the two cerebral hemispheres, with the left hemisphere biased for processing high-frequency information and the right hemisphere biased for processing low-frequency information.