Sound source similarity influences change perception during complex scene perception

Abstract

Everyday listening involves identifying an ever-changing milieu of sound sources in the environment. Recent studies have demonstrated that change perception during complex listening tasks is highly error prone; errors can exceed 30% for sounds that are clearly detectable and identifiable in isolation. This change deafness has been generally attributed to failures of attention or memory. The current study investigates the possibility that lower-level informational effects such as acoustic or semantic similarity are predictive of change perception errors. Listeners were briefly presented with pairs of auditory scenes. In experiment 1, the listeners’ were asked to identify if a change in sound source occurred. In experiment 2, listeners were asked to indicate where a change occurred across an array of loudspeakers. Results indicate that performance on the change identification and localization task was strongly influenced by the degree of similarity between the changed source and the “background” sources. Further, the semantic heterogeneity of the background seemed to be important predictor of performance on these change perception task.