Development of a new localisation test method for young children
McCartney, Damon*, Church, Carla§ and Seeber, Bernhard* 
*MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Nottingham, UK
§School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Several studies have looked at how children localise sounds, however, accurate and 
quantitative measurements have rarely been taken due to the difficulty of measuring 
children’s responses and keeping the child engaged in the task. We have developed a game-
like localisation task to accurately and quantitatively measure auditory localisation ability in 
young children. It uses a setup of 48 loudspeakers and three video screens in an anechoic 
room (Seeber et al., 2010). Various backgrounds, objects and animations can be projected 
onto the screens, defining different game scenes. The task starts by capturing the child’s 
attention at the front using a short animation. Then, a sound is presented from a direction in 
the frontal hemifield. Positive responses, where the child turns towards the sound, are 
rewarded by presenting a short animation at the sound location. Since this procedure 
reinforces intuitive head movements to the sound location it can be performed without any 
instructions, permitting the testing of children before they have learned to understand speech. 
To date we have tested five children, aged between fourteen months and five years. Their 
motivation in the task was assessed by counting the number of positive responses before they 
became distracted from it. While the group conducted on average 24 consecutive trials, the 
youngest child yielded 22 trials, indicating the high motivation elicited by the method. 
Accurate and quantitative measurement of localisation ability is achieved via wireless motion 
trackers placed on the child’s head, hands and body. The greatest rotational angle was 
extracted from the head motion data and defined as the localised sound direction. Three 
children, aged 3 to 5 years, demonstrated the similar linear, underestimating relationship 
between average head location and target direction as adult participants. However, 
localisation variance was much higher in the children. 
The results show that the new localisation method can be intuitively performed by children as 
young as one year who are motivated to conduct a high number of trials. The future aim is to 
use this task to assess the development of binaural hearing in children with cochlear implants. 

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Intramural Programme of the MRC.

References
Seeber, B. U., Kerber, S., and Hafter, E. R. (2010). "A System to Simulate and Reproduce 
Audio-Visual Environments for Spatial Hearing Research," Hearing Research 260, 1-10.