Varieties of attention affect auditory perception of scenes

Abstract

Past empirical work on perception of complex auditory scenes has demonstrated striking effects of attention on perception. Here, we present data from recent studies of auditory stream segregation and change deafness, demonstrating that different types of attention influence what is perceived. During auditory stream segregation, we found that the increasing tendency to perceive segregation as more alternations of low and high tones are presented (i.e., buildup) is facilitated by attending to the tone patterns, regardless of whether participants were actively making judgments of segregation. In contrast, performing the segregation task was necessary to enhance the influence of the frequency separation of the immediately prior tone pattern, suggesting a form of task-based (as opposed to stimulus-based) attention. During change detection, we found that cueing participants to which object is likely to be replaced in a scene of multiple objects facilitates successful detection of changes, while providing an inv...