Precedence effect

Alright kiddo, have you ever been to a concert or a birthday party and heard the same sound coming from different speakers? That's called 'spatial hearing'. Now, when you hear the same sound from two different speakers, the sound doesn't always reach our ears at the same time. It actually takes time for the sound to travel from one speaker to our ears and then from the other speaker to our ears. This delay in sound is called 'Inter-aural Time Difference (ITD)'.

The precedence effect is simply our brain's ability to process sounds from different locations in such a way that it perceives it as a single sound coming from a single location. It does this by giving more weight to the sound that arrives first and ignoring the sound arriving later. This is because our brain assumes that the first sound we hear is the most reliable and accurate.

For example, let's say you hear the same sound from two speakers, one close to you and the other one farther away. The sound from the closer speaker reaches your ears first, and the sound from the farther one arrives later with a slight delay. Your brain processes the sound from the closer speaker as the original sound, and the sound from the farther speaker is perceived as an echo. This is due to the precedence effect.

The precedence effect is crucial in spatial hearing because it helps us to identify the source of a sound accurately. It also helps us to distinguish between different sounds coming from multiple speakers and filter out unwanted noises.

So, in simpler terms, the precedence effect is like a superhero power of our brain that helps us to hear sounds better in noisy environments by ignoring the echoes and focusing on the primary sound.