Focusing, maintaining, and switching attention.

Abstract

Humans and other animals have an amazing ability to selectively attend to whatever sound source is most relevant, a task that requires the brain to separate a sound mixture into distinct perceptual objects. Results from a number of recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies from our laboratory and others have begun to tease apart the processes and mechanisms that enable us to select an important source from a sound mixture and attend to it as its meaning unfolds, as well as to switch attention if the need arises. As reviewed in this talk, the processes of focusing, maintaining, and switching auditory attention involve dynamics that directly impact our ability to understand sounds in complex settings. For instance, there is a cost associated with the process of disengaging attention from one source and focusing on another. On top of this switching cost, there is a benefit of maintaining attention to an ongoing source that yields improvements in performance over time. These processes interact with the way we store and remember signals and directly influence how we function in complex auditory scenes, especially social settings like the Speech Communication Poster Session or the Thursday Evening Buffet Social.