Performance on a spatially selective auditory attention listening task for sources in the horizontal or coronal planes

Abstract

Listeners can use spatially selective auditory attention (SSAA) to focus on one talker in a complex acoustic scene. SSAA has been primarily investigated with targets and distractors arrayed in the frontal horizontal plane. In this study we compared normally hearing human listeners' performance on static and dynamic SSAA tasks in a frontal target/distractor configuration to performance with sources arrayed in either the rear horizontal plane, the overhead coronal plane, or the “underhead” coronal plane, all of which provide similar binaural difference cues with which to differentiate target and distractor locations. To achieve the coronal plane configurations, the listener's head was tipped forward to align the normally vertical axis with the horizontal plane. In the SSAA task, listeners attempted to report a 4-digit sequence of spoken digits from the target location while ignoring two simultaneous equal-intensity sequences spoken by the same talker presented from flanking loudspeakers separated by ±22.5° from the target. Listeners either held their head still (static conditions) with the front (horizontal configurations) or top (coronal configurations) of the head oriented toward 0 azimuth, or were oscillated passively at ∼0.14 Hz with an amplitude of ±45 degrees about the vertical axis (dynamic conditions).