Home > Encyclopedia of Psychology > Localization (Sensory)

The ability of animals and humans to determine the origin of a sensory input.

One of the highly developed abilities that humans and other animals possess is the ability to determine where a sensory input originates.

The capacity to localize a sound, for example, depends on two general mechanisms. The first is relevant for low frequency (i.e., low pitch) sounds and involves the fact that sound coming from a given source arrives at our ears at slightly different times. The second mechanisms applies to high frequency (i.e., high pitch) sounds; if such a sound comes from one side, one ear hears it more loudly than the other and we can detect location based on differences in the loudness of the sound at each ear.

Low frequency sounds that come from the noisemaking source will enter the nearer ear first; these sound waves will then bend around our head and arrive at the far ear a short time...