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

Abstract

In auditory scenes containing many similar sound sources, sorting of acoustic information into streams becomes difficult, which can lead to disruptions in the identification of behaviorally relevant targets. This study investigated the benefit of providing simple visual cues for when and/or where a target would occur in a complex acoustic mixture. Importantly, the visual cues provided no information about the target content. In separate experiments, human subjects either identified learned birdsongs in the presence of a chorus of unlearned songs or recalled strings of spoken digits in the presence of speech maskers. A visual cue indicating which loudspeaker (from an array of five) would contain the target improved accuracy for both kinds of stimuli. A cue indicating which time segment (out of a possible five) would contain the target also improved accuracy, but much more for birdsong than for speech. These results suggest that in real world situations, information about where a target of interest is located can enhance its identification, while information about when to listen can also be helpful when targets are unfamiliar or extremely similar to their competitors.

Object-based auditory and visual attention

“…Evidence suggests that attention acts on auditory objects, much as it enhances visual objects [25,26,27]. Moreover, listeners appear to attend actively to one and only one auditory object at a time [28,29], consistent with the biasedcompetition model of visual attention (see Text Box 1).…”

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.…”

Effects of Sensorineural Hearing Loss on Visually Guided Attention in a Multitalker Environment

“…2a). The loudspeakers were positioned within the visual field at lateral angles of −30°, −15°, 0°, 15°, and 30°, a slightly different loudspeaker arrangement than that used in Best et al (2007), who used a wider angular separation (20°) and a shorter arc radius (1 m). The listener was seated on a chair in the center of the loudspeaker arc, with a head rest to minimize head movements.…”

“…Best et al (2007) examined the benefits of attentional cueing when listeners were presented with five simultaneous streams of speech presented from five loudspeakers. The streams were unintelligible (time-reversed sequences of numbers) except for a relatively brief, intelligible target (a fivedigit sequence of numbers) that occurred from a randomly chosen loudspeaker at an unpredictable time.…”

“…The goal of the current study was to explore in more detail the sources of this difficulty. In particular, we adopted the paradigm of Best et al (2007) to identify whether listeners with sensorineural hearing loss (HL) are able to use top-down attention to enhance speech intelligibility to the same extent as listeners with normal hearing (NH). Based on previous work, we expected HL listeners to be poorer overall at understanding speech in the presence of competition (e.g., Bronkhorst and Plomp 1992;Mackersie et al 2001;Arbogast et al 2005;Marrone et al 2008).…”