Abstract
The everyday auditory environment is complex and dynamic; often, multiple sounds co-occur and compete for a listener’s cognitive resources. ‘Change deafness’, framed as the auditory analog to the well-documented phenomenon of ‘change blindness’, describes the finding that changes presented within complex environments are often missed. The present study examines a number of stimulus factors that may influence change deafness under real-world listening conditions. Specifically, an AX (same-different) discrimination task was used to examine the effects of both spatial separation over a loudspeaker array and the type of change (sound source additions and removals) on discrimination of changes embedded in complex backgrounds. Results using signal detection theory and accuracy analyses indicated that, under most conditions, errors were significantly reduced for spatially distributed relative to non-spatial scenes. A second goal of the present study was to evaluate a possible link between memory for scene contents and change discrimination. Memory was evaluated by presenting a cued recall test following each trial of the discrimination task. Results using signal detection theory and accuracy analyses indicated that recall ability was similar in terms of accuracy, but there were reductions in sensitivity compared to previous reports. Finally, the present study used a large and representative sample of outdoor, urban, and environmental sounds, presented in unique combinations of nearly 1000 trials per participant. This enabled the exploration of the relationship between change perception and the perceptual similarity between change targets and background scene sounds. These (post hoc) analyses suggest both a categorical and a stimulus-level relationship between scene similarity and the magnitude of change errors.
Highlights
An ‘auditory scene’ is broadly defined as an array of concurrent sound sources (Gygi & Shafiro, 2010)
Auditory scenes can be as simple as a set of pure tones, one or more chords, or a complex array of environmental sounds, like that encountered on a busy city street corner, in a restaurant kitchen during the lunch rush, or in a stadium filled for a rock concert
An example of the pervasiveness of perceptual errors is evident in the ‘change deafness’ phenomenon, which describes the failure of listeners to notice changes when they are embedded within complex auditory scenes
Summary
An ‘auditory scene’ is broadly defined as an array of concurrent sound sources (Gygi & Shafiro, 2010). Increasing the complexity of an auditory scene increases the perceptual and cognitive demands for processing and can lead to misperceptions Such misperceptions can manifest as inaccurate or inaccessible perceptual representations (Darwin et al 1972; Näätänen & Winkler, 1999), which can be influenced by top-down factors such as attention, attributions of relevance, and interactions between short- and long-term memory processes (e.g., Zimmermann et al, 2016; Kidd et al, 2008; Gregg & Samuel, 2008; Cowan, 2001). Change deafness seems to be influenced by attention, namely cueing or directing attention to the spatial location of a changed sound source can reduce the frequency of change perception errors (Eramudugolla et al, 2005; Backer & Alain, 2012)
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