Selective attention to the parameters of a physically informed sonic model

Abstract

Two experiments tested listeners’ ability to attend selectively to the properties of a physical model comprising collisions between multiple independent sound-producing objects. A probe signal paradigm measured attention to two properties—resonant frequency and number of colliding objects. Listeners completed a baseline task measuring absolute sensitivity at each stimulus against a background noise. Subsequently, stimuli served as both cues and targets; cue validity was probabilistic. When cue and target were generated by the same object (Experiment 1), greater detectability occurred with valid cues for both resonant frequency and object number, implying the presence of attentional mechanisms for these properties. When cue and target were generated by different objects (Experiment 2), selective attention persisted for object number but not for resonant frequency.