Change deafness: The inability to detect changes in a talker’s voice

Abstract

Change blindness is a failure to detect a change in a visual scene. A shadowing task was used to demonstrate an auditory analog to change blindness–change deafness. Participants repeated words varying in lexical difficulty. After a rest-break they heard more words from either the same or a different talker. Answers to explicit questions about the change in talker and implicit measures of behavior (i.e., response latencies) demonstrate that processing is affected by the change, even if participants do not explicitly report a change in talker. Specifically, listeners who did not detect the change in the talker had a greater difference between conditions of lexical difficulty than listeners who noticed the change, or listeners who heard the same talker throughout. These results suggest that failures to detect changes are not limited to the visual domain and that processing at some level may be affected by changes in the environment. Furthermore, these results have implications for models of spoken word recognition.