Abstract
Previous research has shown that structural features such as voice changes, jingle onsets, and production effects in a radio broadcast elicit cardiac orienting responses. In fact, the voice change has been shown to reliably elicit orienting without habituation after several repetitions. However, repeated onsets of two other auditory structural features—jingles and production effects—did result in habituation when the participant was exposed to them embedded in an audio production absent a central cognitive task. This article presents two experiments testing the possibility that adding a central task prevents the development of a robust neural model of the auditory structural features necessary for habituation. In both studies, results show that adding a primary cognitive task eliminated habituation to jingles and production effects. However, varying the cognitive load of the primary task across two levels of difficulty had no significant effect on habituation.
Highlights
Audio producers have instinctively used certain techniques to increase the likelihood of gaining the listener’s attention
The first repetition is qualitatively different than the others, inspection of the cardiac response curve (CRC) beyond the typical 6-second window used to identify orienting response (OR) showed that the orienting to the first onset took longer to return to baseline, likely due to the heightened novelty of a first occurrence
All five CRCs show cardiac decelerations and not eventual non-response or acceleration as demonstrated in Potter et al (2015). This leads to the conclusion that ORs were elicited by all five repetitions of the auditory structural features when the participants were focused on a simple primary task of their own choosing
Summary
Audio producers have instinctively used certain techniques to increase the likelihood of gaining the listener’s attention. Music, and vocal exclamations are often intuitively employed in such a manner by professional audio producers In support of this routine industry practice, a substantial literature exists that uses physiological and behavioral data to demonstrate the ability of auditory structural features to increase automatic attention capture among listeners (Potter, 2000; Potter, Lang & Bolls, 2008). Potter et al (2008) later demonstrated that the onset of several auditory structural features result in cardiac deceleration in the quadratic or cubic pattern associated with orienting (Graham, 1979) These include sound effects, production effects (e.g. laser and drone sounds common in modern radio), and jingles (i.e. musical station identifications). After multiple stimuli onsets, the compared neural models begin to overlap and the OR begins to diminish
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