Did you hear that? The role of stimulus similarity and uncertainty in auditory change deafness

Kelly Dickerson,Jeremy R Gaston

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01125

Abstract

Change deafness, the auditory analog to change blindness, occurs when salient, and behaviorally relevant changes to sound sources are missed. Missing significant changes in the environment can have serious consequences, however, this effect, has remained little more than a lab phenomenon and a party trick. It is only recently that researchers have begun to explore the nature of these profound errors in change perception. Despite a wealth of examples of the change blindness phenomenon, work on change deafness remains fairly limited. The purpose of the current paper is to review the state of the literature on change deafness and propose an explanation of change deafness that relies on factors related to stimulus information rather than attentional or memory limits. To achieve this, work on across several auditory research domains, including environmental sound classification, informational masking, and change deafness are synthesized to present a unified perspective on the perception of change errors in complex, dynamic sound environments. We hope to extend previous research by describing how it may be possible to predict specific patters of change perception errors based on varying degrees of similarity in stimulus features and uncertainty about which stimuli and features are important for a given perceptual decision.

Highlights

Change deafness, the auditory analog to change blindness, occurs when salient, and behaviorally relevant changes to sound sources are missed
CONCLUDING COMMENTS The link between stimulus information and performance is important in understanding perception in the real world
Change deafness reflects a fundamental limitation to human perceptual experiences, and can help reveal the basic mechanisms underlying perceptual errors in complex listening

Summary

Introduction

The auditory analog to change blindness, occurs when salient, and behaviorally relevant changes to sound sources are missed. Naturally occurring variability, listeners are typically able to extract sourcerelevant information to detect, localize, and identify meaningful sound source changes in their environment These processes can be considered together under the function of auditory scene analysis, in which individual sound features are segmented or bound into coherent sound “objects.” An important outcome of a successful auditory scene analysis is the ability to notice behaviorally meaningful changes in complex environments (Bregman, 1994; Snyder et al, 2012). Accidents can occur even when the alarm is very distinct (e.g., Vaillancourt et al, 2013) This is a real world example of the laboratory phenomenon of change deafness—where behaviorally meaningful changes within complex auditory scenes are often missed (Gregg and Samuel, 2008). Similarity and uncertainty in auditory change deafness around 30%; this level is common across a number of studies (e.g., Gregg and Samuel, 2008; Snyder and Gregg, 2011; Vitevitch and Donoso, 2011; Backer and Alain, 2012)

Objectives

Conclusion