Fig. 3. Relationship between the interaural delay and marker correlation on detecting the binaural gap. Top panel (a): The solid curve shows the function for the effect of interaural delay on the duration threshold. The horizontal solid lines represent the duration threshold measured at each of the marker correlations (1, 0.85, 0.7, 0.55, and 0.4); the vertical dashed line represents the interaural delay computed from function at these duration thresholds. The filled circles depict the interaural delay and marker correlation with equivalent effect on the duration threshold. Middle panel (b): The solid curve shows the function for the effect of marker correlation on the duration threshold. The horizontal solid lines represent the duration threshold measured at each of the interaural delays (0, 2, 4, 6 and 8 ms); the vertical dashed line represents the marker correlation computed from function at these duration thresholds. The open circles depict the interaural delay and marker correlation with equivalent effect on the duration threshold. Lower panel (c): the solid line shows the best fitting function between the interaural delays and marker correlations from the five samples from the upper panel (filled circles) and five samples from middle panel (open circles); the equation of the best-fitting function is presented in the top left.

听觉系统对于双耳声音的主观整合受到两个声音之间的时间延迟以及相关性的影响。当双耳声音（如噪声）同时到达时，等同的双耳噪声被知觉为一个融合的听觉声像。随着双耳噪声的耳间相关性降低，这一融合的声像逐渐弥散并最终变为两个分离的听觉声像。有趣的是，即使不改变双耳噪声的耳间相关性而只是提高耳间延迟（从零到若干毫秒），双耳等同噪声所形成的单一融合声像也会逐渐弥散，并最终变为两个分离的听觉声像。这提示耳间延迟和耳间相关性很可能是双耳加工中关系极为密切的两个因素。但尚没有任何研究同时考察这两个因素并且探讨它们在双耳加工过程中的关系。因此，当前研究通过测量被试对双耳相关噪声中的不相关片段（耳间相关性为0）的感受性，同时考察了耳间延迟和耳间相关性对于这一感受性的影响及其关系。我们发现，当双耳等同噪声的耳间延迟从0毫秒增加到8毫秒时，被试所能探测到不相关片段的最短长度（探测阈限）呈现指数增长模式。当耳间延迟保持为0毫秒时，随着双耳噪声的耳间相关性从1线性减小到0.4，被试的探测阈限也呈现出相似的指数增长模式。通过实验所观察到耳间延迟和耳间相关性对同一组被试的双耳加工能力的影响，我们得以用一个线性方程描述这两个因素在双耳加工过程中的关系：耳间延迟每增加1毫秒的效果相当于耳间相关性降低0.07所产生的效果。我们认为，在双耳声音的主观表征过程中耳间延迟和耳间相关性两个因素之间存在重要的联动关系。

Lingzhi Kong, Zilong Xie, Lingxi Lu, Tianshu Qu, Xihong Wu, Jun Yan and Liang Li*.(2015). Similar impacts of the interaural delay and interaural correlation on binaural gap detection. PLOS ONE. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0126342