Change deafness, dual-task performance, and domain-specific expertise

Abstract

In a change deafness manipulation using radio broadcasts of sporting events, we show that change deafness to a switch in talker increases when listeners are asked to monitor both lexical and indexical information for change. We held semantic content constant and demonstrated a change deafness rate of 85% when participants listened to the home team broadcast of a hockey game that switched midway to the away team broadcast with a different announcer. In Study 2, participants were asked to monitor either the indexical characteristics (listen for a change in announcer) or both the indexical and semantic components (listen for a change in announcer or a goal scored). Monitoring both components led to significantly greater change deafness even though both groups were alerted to the possibility of a change in announcer. In Study 3, we changed both the indexical and the semantic components when the broadcast switched from a hockey game to a basketball game. We found a negative correlation between sports expertise and change deafness. The results are discussed in terms of the nature of perceptual representation and the influence of expertise and evolution on attention allocation.

The unnoticed zoo: Inattentional deafness to animal sounds in music

“…Another explanation might be that errors are a consequence of detecting the animal sound, diverting the attention from the primary task to the sound, and as a result, losing the count. These results are not only consistent with inattentional blindness/deafness literature (e.g., Wayand et al, 2005 ), but are also in accordance with findings on change deafness (see, e.g., Neuhoff, & Bochtler, 2018 ; tendentially in Vitevitch, 2003 ). However, Koreimann et al ( 2014 ) did not find significant differences in the primary task between detecting and not detecting the unusual event.…”

“…However, performance was only tendentially slower for those who detected the change. Participants in a study by Neuhoff and Bochtler ( 2018 ) were instructed to listen carefully to a radio broadcast of sporting events to be able to answer questions regarding the broadcast afterwards. Halfway through the broadcast, the announcer changed, and 85% did not detect a change in the announcer.…”

Top-down effect of dialogue coherence on perceived speaker identity

“…The beep could be acting as a masking stimulus, affecting and compromising the perception of the speech 51 and rendering it more difficult to compare the speaker voices of the first and second TCU in Experiment 2 compared to Experiment 1. The literature suggests that the ability to detect information in the speech stream is reduced when attention is directed away from speech 52 and work on change deafness specifically indicates that distractors and the way in which we direct attention have robust effects on change detection 9 , 12 . The presence of the beep in Experiment 2 thus reduces the comparability of our two experiments.…”