Yakov Altman
Country:
Russia
Company:
Medicine
Aspecial role for the development of research in the field of spatial hearing was played by the discovery of Yakov Altman of neurons - detectors of the direction of movement of thesound source (1968), which meant the possibility of direct coding of movement parameters in the auditory centers. The hypothesis of a specialized mecha- nism for processing the parameters of the motion of a sound source, proposed by him, aroused extreme interest in the leading laboratories of the world and initiated a huge number of works, the flow of which has not diminished to this day. It has become a tradition that the authors cite Yakov Altman as the founder of the detector principle of coding the motion parameters of a sound source.
In 1972, he headed the laboratory of the physiology of hearing at the Institute of Physiology. I.P. Pavlova. The main direction ofthe work was the study of thelaws of spatial hearing in humans and animals. The list of studies carried out under the gui- dance of Altman is broad, and, at the same time, he is united by a striking unity of pur- pose: to characterize the laws of localization of motionless and moving sound sources at the psychophysical and neurophysiological levels. Among the most important re- sults of research carried out under the guidance of Altman, is the acquisition of cha- racteristics of human perception of moving sound sources in different planes of space: boundary time parameters of sound signals necessary for sensing movement.