Spatial influences on change detection within complex auditory scenes

Abstract

Change deafness is the auditory analog to change blindness. Both phenomena represent a tendency to miss large changes in the environment, suggesting that sensory experiences are not verbatim and may details crucial for detection and identification. Spatial separation facilitates change detection in vision, but its role in auditory change detection is unclear. In this study, we examined the impact of spatial separation on the detection of appearing and or disappearing sound sources in an auditory scene. Participants listened to a brief auditory scene (1000 ms) comprised of four sources followed by a scene where a sound source was added or subtracted from the scene or where no change occurred. There were two listening conditions, where the sound sources were each distributed across a loudspeaker array, or the sound sources were all played from a single loudspeaker. Results indicate that listeners were better able to detect appearing than disappearing sounds, and fewer errors were made when sound sources were spatially separated. These results are consistent with an attention-based explanation of change detection failures. Further, the beneficial effect of spatial separation suggests that change blindness and deafness may share a common mechanism.