Acoustic spatial information is processed in several stages along the auditory pathway. Different spatial cues are extracted within a limited frequency range and then integrated both across cue type and across frequency to determine perceived location. In mammals, little is known about where in the pathway this integration occurs or where visually-guided auditory spatial adaptation occurs.

Two experiments were performed to explore how listeners adapt to a novel mapping between acoustic spatial cues and exocentric locations in space. Listeners were trained with visual feedback to adjust their perceptual localization of acoustic stimuli. The experiments tested the degree to which the perceptual adaptation elicited by such training generalized to sounds with untrained frequency content or in untrained regions of space, respectively.

Results show that adaptation generalizes across frequency only for stimuli with the same dominant spatial cue, suggesting that 1) spatial information is integrated across frequency before being integrated across cue type, and 2) adaptation takes at a stage intermediate between these two processing stages. Spatial generalization is limited to locations in space near the locations presented during training. This result hints that auditory spatial adaptation occurs when auditory spatial information is encoded in a way that preserves spatial topology.