Listener head motion can degrade spatial selective auditory attention

Abstract

Listeners can use spatial selective auditory attention (SSAA) to focus on one talker in a complex acoustic scene. Although the dynamic binaural cues generated by listener head motion improve sound localization, and might therefore enhance the perceptual differences between separated targets and distractors, the effect of head motion on SSAA is unknown. We measured listeners’ ability to attend, with and without head motion, to a frontal target in the presence of two symmetrically separated distractors. During stationary trials, listeners visually fixated and oriented toward a target loudspeaker. On head-motion trials, listeners oscillated their heads at ~0.5 Hz with an amplitude of ~±40° while continuously directing their gaze toward the target. On each trial, three equal-intensity sequences of four spoken digits were presented simultaneously as target and distractors. Listeners reported the target sequence heard. With distractors at ±22.5°, 86% of target digits were reported correctly without motion, but only 72% were reported correctly with head motion. Correspondingly, the percentage of distractor digits reported as targets increased from 11% to 23%. For widely separated distractors, there was no performance penalty for head motion. These results suggest that listeners cannot rapidly update the focus of their SSAA to compensate for head motion.