Comparison of cues in auditory selective and divided attention

Abstract

This study investigated auditory selective and divided attention in ten normal-hearing listeners. Subjects listened to two simultaneous sentence-like utterances from the Coordinate Response Measure (CRM) speech corpus at 90 dB SPL in dichotic or monotic listening conditions. This corpus has the following format, Ready (call sign), go to (color) (number), now, with all possible combinations of call signs (8), colors (4) and numbers (8). In all conditions, the listener identified the color-number coordinates spoken by the target talker. The target talker was identified by a cue provided either prior to (selective attention) or following (divided attention) the presentation of the two simultaneous utterances. In the first experiment, either the ear or the call sign served as the cue for the target talker in monotic or dichotic listening conditions. In the second experiment, talker gender served as the cue in monotic listening conditions. Across both experiments, performance for selective attention was superior to that for divided attention. Performance for ear or gender cueing was better than for call sign. Analysis showed that 80% of errors were due to intrusions from the competing utterance, supporting an informational (attention), rather than energetic, form of masking. [Work supported, in part, by NIH R01 AG08293.]