Two ears give small but consistent gains across all auditory tasks

Evidence

If asked whether two ears are better than one, most people would answer with an emphatic yes! Almost a century of psychoacoustical work has demonstrated small, but consistent, benefits on detection, discrimination, and identification for the same sounds presented to one (monaural) versus two (binaural) ears. … Roughly speaking, Table 7–1 illustrates that the binaural advantage is small, consistent, and very similar across the different tasks. We also note that reaction time experiments to pure tones have demonstrated a small and consistent binaural advantage (about 4 ms; Simon, 1967). — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1425

Almost a century of psychoacoustical work has demonstrated small, but consistent, benefits on detection, discrimination, and identification for the same sounds presented to one (monaural) versus two (binaural) ears. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1426

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1425; Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1426