Directed Attention Eliminates ‘Change Deafness’ in Complex Auditory Scenes

Abstract

In natural environments that contain multiple sound sources, acoustic energy arising from the different sources sums to produce a single complex waveform at each of the listener's ears. The auditory system must segregate this waveform into distinct streams to permit identification of the objects from which the signals emanate [1]. Although the processes involved in stream segregation are now reasonably well understood [1, 2 and 3], little is known about the nature of our perception of complex auditory scenes. Here, we examined complex scene perception by having listeners detect a discrete change to an auditory scene comprising multiple concurrent naturalistic sounds. We found that listeners were remarkably poor at detecting the disappearance of an individual auditory object when listening to scenes containing more than four objects, but they performed near perfectly when their attention was directed to the identity of a potential change. In the absence of directed attention, this "change deafness" [4] was greater for objects arising from a common location in space than for objects separated in azimuth. Change deafness was also observed for changes in object location, suggesting that it may reflect a general effect of the dependence of human auditory perception on attention.

Change perception in complex auditory scenes

“…A subsequent study (Eramudugolla et al, 2005) more closely paralleled the procedure and scene complexity that characterize change blindness. In that study, participants monitored two consecutive naturalistic auditory scenes, each lasting 5 sec and comprising multiple auditory objects, to detect whether one of the auditory objects present in the first scene disappeared from the second.…”

“…This technique consists of the presentation of a single pair of events (here auditory scenes) in each experimental trial, and participants are required to detect any difference between the two. It is interesting to note that Eramudugolla et al (2005) made the explicit assumption that a 500-msec burst of noise between the two auditory scenes was critical to eliciting the phenomenon of change deafness in their study. As they clearly stated, the noise burst was added between the scenes "to mask any [auditory] transient or echoic memory trace that might cue the listener's attention to the change" (Eradumugolla et al, 2005(Eradumugolla et al, , p. 1108.…”

“…also Gallace, Auvray, Tan, & Spence, 2006, for a visuotactile version of the paradigm). The existence of change deafness has also been described: A listener's ability to detect a change in the auditory scene declines systematically as the complexity of the scene increases-specifically, when attention cannot be directed to the changing feature or object in advance (Eramudugolla, Irvine, McAnally, Martin, & Mattingley, 2005; see also Vitevitch, 2003).…”

Influence of Task-Relevant and Task-Irrelevant Feature Continuity on Selective Auditory Attention

“…Many recent studies have examined selective auditory attention (e.g., Freyman et al 1999;Eramudugolla et al 2005;Kidd et al 2005;Best et al 2007;Brungart and Simpson 2007;Best et al 2008;Ihlefeld and Shinn-Cunningham 2008a, b;Marrone et al 2008); however, most of these studies ignored whether continuity of task-irrelevant auditory features affects selective attention. As a result, we know little about the degree to which auditory features that are irrelevant to a listener's goals bias selective auditory attention.…”

Visually-guided Attention Enhances Target Identification in a Complex Auditory Scene

“…For the detection of a pure tone target in the presence of tonal maskers, a priori knowledge about target frequency improves performance (Richards and Neff 2004). For mixtures of natural everyday sounds, attention to the identity of a target source increases the probability that a listener will notice the source disappearing (Eramudugolla et al 2005). In the spatial domain, Arbogast and Kidd (2000) showed that a priori knowledge about target location in an array of tonal patterns improves a listener_s ability to process the target.…”