Chapter 3 Auditory attention

Abstract

This chapter presents three aspects of attention: (1) attention as selection (the cocktail party studies); (2) attention as set (the temporal allocation studies); and (3) attention as organizing the auditory environment (the streaming and auditory illusion studies). The chapter also discusses doubts that could be cast upon some well-known studies that expressed much optimism about the fate of unattended messages, advocating that there is an inherent confounding of attentional selection features in the dichotic paradigm. Good example of a study that explicitly investigated the temporal allocation of attention in a single speech stream is based on Martin's model for rhythmic structure in speech and other behavior, which states that speech elements are hierarchically organized, providing an underlying temporal structure within which elements are related instead of being simply concatenated. The sequences of nine tones have been constructed from a three-tone argument by applying certain rules. A three-tone argument comprised, for instance, the increasing musical tones G4, A4, and B4 from the C major scale. The three-tone argument has been preceded and succeeded by three-tone patterns resulting from one or two higher rules, which yielded melodic strings.