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The Impact of Emotional Salience on Sound localization in Realistic Virtual Environments

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Jade Shelp¹ (), Blake Butler¹, Elle Cumming¹, Derek Mitchell¹; ¹Western University

The impact of emotion on spatial processing is well established in the visual domain yet lagging in the auditory system. Evidence suggests emotional sounds may be localized more rapidly and accurately than neutral sounds. However, most studies lack ecological validity, presenting sounds through headphones or limited source locations (e.g. front versus back). The present study aimed to determine the effect of emotional salience on sound localization within a naturalistic auditory environment. Sounds were presented in an Audiodome, a spherical speaker array enabling the creation of realistic soundscapes. The stimuli used were negative (e.g., screams) and neutral (e.g., footsteps) auditory stimuli matched on low-level acoustic features from the International Affective Digitized Sounds. Blindfolded participants localized sounds among 24 speaker locations using digitally tracked finger pointing. The initial response occurred during sound presentation and a second followed a brief delay to measure location memory. Reaction time and accuracy were the outcome measures. Participants exhibited significantly greater accuracy for stimuli presented left of fixation relative to the right and stimuli localized during the first timepoint versus the second. A significant main effect of emotion was observed for RT and accuracy in the absence of any interactions. This effect was characterized by significantly faster, but less precise localization of emotional relative to neutral stimuli. Emotion, side of presentation and timepoint plays a significant role in our sound localization abilities. These findings suggest a potential speed-accuracy trade-off in the localization of emotional sounds, prioritizing more rapid reactions to emotional stimuli at the cost of precision.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions