Development of auditory selective attention: Why children struggle to hear in noisy environments.

Abstract

Children’s hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4–11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were influenced by (i.e., gave weight to) each spectral region of the stimulus. Psychometric fits were also used to estimate levels of internal noise and bias. Levels of masking were found to decrease with age, becoming adult-like by 9–11 years. This change was explained by improvements in selective attention alone, with older listeners better able to ignore noise similar in frequency to the target. Consistent with this, age-related differences in masking were abolished when the noise was made more distant in frequency to the target. This work offers novel evidence that improvements in selective attention are critical for the normal development of auditory judgments.

Binaural hearing in children using Gaussian enveloped and transposed tones

“…As has been noted in prior literature, psychophysical tasks may require the use of non-sensory abilities and selective attention, which are undergoing continued maturation throughout childhood beyond 8-10 yrs (Litovsky, 1997;Lutfi et al, 2003;Davidson et al, 2006;Jones et al, 2015). These nonauditory factors may be underlying the variability in performance seen in both experiments.…”

Individual differences in speech-in-noise perception parallel neural speech processing and attention in preschoolers

“…speech-in-noise perception), the process of filtering information in the perceptual stream demands attention, and age-related attention improvements augment speech-in-noise perception in school-aged children and adults (Jones et al, 2015). Here, we find the children who made the greatest improvement in their speech-in-noise perception from year to year also “caught-up” to their peers in sustained attention performance, an index of extrinsic attention.…”

Hearing Where the Eyes See: Children Use an Irrelevant Visual Cue When Localizing Sounds

“…Evidence showing that the ability to filter out irrelevant information increases with age has been limited so far to within-modality studies using flankers or auditory noise (Jones, Moore, & Amitay, 2015;Ridderinkhof, van der Molen, Band, & Bashore, 1997;Shepp & Barrett, 1991;Tipper, Bourque, Anderson, & Brehaut, 1989). Here, we examine how selective the integration of multisensory information is during childhood, by testing whether 7-to 10-year-old children and adults could ignore, and so avoid integrating, irrelevant but synchronized multisensory information.…”