Updating of spatial selective auditory attention under-compensates for listener head movement

Abstract

Listeners can use spatial selective auditory attention (SSAA) to focus on one talker in a complex acoustic scene. In our dynamic SSAA task, listeners oscillate their heads ~±40 deg at ~0.5 Hz while five different simultaneous sequences of four spoken digits are presented from loudspeakers at 0 deg azimuth (the target) and ±22.5 deg and ±45 deg azimuth (four distractors); listeners report the target sequence heard. We have observed [ASA, Minneapolis 2018] that listeners are more likely to misreport distractors that are centrally located in head-centered coordinates at the moment of presentation, and that under static conditions, performance declines with increasing target eccentricity—suggesting either that listeners cannot rapidly update the focus of their SSAA to compensate head motion (“lag” ) or that they have difficulty directing SSAA eccentrically (“low gain” ). To differentiate these alternatives, spatio-temporal maps of SSAA, conditioned on head orientation and direction of motion during each digit, were derived by computing the percentage of reported digits corresponding to those emitted by each loudspeaker. The spatial pattern of errors depended primarily on head orientation and not on direction of motion, suggesting that in this task SSAA tends to remain centrally focused in head-centered coordinates (low gain) rather than lagging dynamic head position.