Auditory Attention

Question 1

William James, 1890

Answer 1

Difference between active (top-down) and passive (Bottom-up) attention

Question 2

Chun et al., 2011

Answer 2

External attention and internal attention (attention to thoughts)

Question 3

McDermot, 2009

Answer 3

People must do two things when attending to sound
1. Sound segregation - knowing which sounds belong together
2. Locating the source of the sound and ignoring other sources
Perception of what a person is saying tends to be easier if you’ve heard that person’s voice in isolation before - role of memory? Top-down sound familiarity and recognition?

Question 4

Shen et al., 2008

Answer 4

Voice recognition machines work almost perfectly when there is only one clear sound source but perform poorly in the presence of multiple sounds sources

Question 5

Cherry, 1953

Answer 5

Used shadowing to ensure pps were listening to the attended message
Pps could distinguish physical characteristics of messages in the unattended ear (E.G. sex, intensity and location)
Pps found it hard to separate messages spoken by the same speaker- messages could not be distinguished by meaning alone
Pps could extract little info from the unattended message (E.G. when someone spoke in a diff language)

Question 6

Moray, 1959

Answer 6

Pps did not have memory of a word that was repeated 35 times in the unattended ear
Listeners could detect their own name in the unattended message

Question 7

Broadbent, 1958

Answer 7

Filter Theory

Question 8

Treisman, 1964

Answer 8

Attenuation Model
Found some pps to accidentally shadow words from the unattended ear if the words were probable to appear in the attended message - due to top-down processing

Question 9

Deutsch and Deutsch, 1963

Answer 9

Late filter theory

Question 10

Treisman and Riley, 1969

Answer 10

Found pps detected more target words in the shadowed message than the unattended message

Question 11

Benton et al., 1995

Answer 11

Although some words in the unattended message received some semantic processing, the extent of the processing was little in comparison to the that of the attended message

Question 12

Li et al., 2011

Answer 12

Women dissatisfied with weight had more shadowing errors when weight related words were spoken in the unattended message compared to women who were satisfied with their weight - Messages with significance to the listener can grasp attention

Question 13

Conway et al., 2001

Answer 13

Ppl with poor working memory were more likely to detect their name in the unattended message than those with better working memory because they have less attentional control
Support for Broadbent’s Filter Theory

Question 14

Coch et al., 2005

Answer 14

ERP’s 100ms after the target word was presented was greater for target words presented in the attended ear than target words presented in the unattended ear
Evidence against Deutsch and Deutsch - attended message receives more processing than the unattended message

Question 15

Horton et al., 2013

Answer 15

Greater brain activity was associated with processing the attended messages in many brain regions
This is due to enhancing the attended message and inhibiting the unattended message - support for Treisman

Question 16

Robinson and McAlpine, 2009

Answer 16

Extensive descending neural pathways from the auditory cortex to brain areas associated with early auditory processing
Suggests top-down role in auditory attention - support for Treisman

Question 17

Marozeau et al., 2010

Answer 17

Musicians were better at following a melody amongst random distractor notes than non-musicians - due to knowledge and expertise
All pps were able to detect a target melody if the number of distractor notes increased over conditions - they had the chance to practise identifying the target melody
Evidence for individual differences (practise effects)

Question 18

Mesgarani and Chang, 2012

Answer 18

Pps attended to one of two voices in the same ear
Auditory cortex activity implied that only one speaker was being listened to, not two
Support for Broadbent

Question 19

Golumbic et al, 2013

Answer 19

Processing of the attended message is enhanced when pps were shown a video of the person talking - visual info influences auditory processing

Question 20

Kurt et al., 2008

Answer 20

Processing one auditory input tends to suppress the neural circuits processing the other auditory stimuli

Question 21

Awh et al., 2012

Answer 21

Auditory processing can be influenced by top-down and bottom-up processing models

Question 22

Shamma and Fritz, 2014

Answer 22

Neurons can be viewed as filters for auditory attention, processing stimuli relevant for task directed goals - attention can differ depending on the sensory context

Question 23

Broadbent, 1958

Answer 23

Numbers played in two different ears were recalled in chunks from each ear, not in the order they were played - evidence for the sensory buffer

Question 24

Dawson and Schell, 1982

Answer 24

Leakage v slippage - Attention may slip to the unattended message (Support for Broadbent)

Question 25

Bidet-Caulet et al., 2014

Answer 25

Found that top-down and bottom-up mechanisms interact to reduce distraction
Increasing top-down attention task load was able to reduce early processing of the distractor task but bottom-up attention capture and behavioural distraction did not decrease

Question 26

Styles, 1997

Answer 26

Auditory attention models provide description but little explanation of auditory attention

Question 27

Nolden and Koch, 2017

Answer 27

Practise was found to reduce task difficulty