Distractor probability influences suppression in auditory selective attention

Abstract

Auditory selective attention is thought to facilitate listening to the sound of interest (e.g., voice or music) in a noisy environment. One mechanism thought to underlie this ability is suppression of distracting stimuli. However, little is known about its operation or characteristics. We tested whether suppression in auditory selective attention capitalizes on statistical regularities in the environment to facilitate attention. Participants listened to seven-second scenes consisting of several voices speaking sequences of numbers and a distractor, which occurred more (70%) or less (30%) frequently across trials. Participants had to find the voice that was a gender singleton and report whether it was saying even or odd numbers. If suppression is an active component of auditory selective attention, task performance was expected to be better when the more frequent distractor was present. Results across the experiment and three replications revealed significantly shorter RTs when the high-probability distractor was in the scene relative to the low-probability distractor. Results are suggestive of a suppression mechanism that mitigates the detrimental influence of a frequently occurring distracting sound.