Auditory localization improves with aligned saccadic orienting

Abstract

Animals actively sample the environment through movements of their sensory organs, yet whether these motor behaviors shape perception beyond the modality they directly control remains unresolved. In the auditory system, eye movements modulate neural activity from the auditory periphery to cortex, but their perceptual consequences have remained elusive. Here, we tested whether spontaneous eye movements exert a general influence on auditory perception or selectively interact with auditory computations involved in spatial orienting. Across four psychophysical experiments, participants freely explored natural scenes while performing auditory localization or pitch discrimination tasks. Brief sounds rapidly reorganized spontaneous gaze behavior, preferentially promoting large orienting saccades toward the sound source while suppressing saccades directed away. Critically, auditory localization systematically depended on the direction of spontaneous saccades: sound localization improved when saccades were directed toward the sound source and declined when saccades were directed away. No comparable relationship was observed during pitch discrimination despite closely matched auditory stimulation and visual exploration. These findings identify a selective coupling between saccadic behavior and auditory localization, providing a behavioral counterpart to the widespread oculomotor modulation observed throughout the auditory system. More broadly, our results suggest that the behavioral consequences of eye movements extend beyond vision, selectively engaging sensory computations linked to spatial orienting.