Octave effect in auditory attention

Octave effect in auditory attention.

After hearing a tone, the human auditory system becomes more sensitive to similar tones than to other tones. Current auditory models explain this phenomenon by a simple bandpass attention filter. Here, we demonstrate that auditory attention involves multiple pass-bands around octave-related frequencies above and below the cued tone. Intriguingly, this "octave effect" not only occurs for physica...

The Goldilocks effect in infant auditory attention.

Infants must learn about many cognitive domains (e.g., language, music) from auditory statistics, yet capacity limits on their cognitive resources restrict the quantity that they can encode. Previous research has established that infants can attend to only a subset of available acoustic input. Yet few previous studies have directly examined infant auditory attention, and none have directly test...

The Octave Illusion and Auditory Perceptual Integration

Does selective attention influence the octave illusion?

The octave illusion occurs when each ear receives a sequence of tones alternating by one octave, but with different frequencies in each ear. Most listeners report a high pitch in one ear alternating with a low pitch in the opposite ear. Deutsch and Roll proposed an influential suppression model of the illusion in which the pitch is determined by ear dominance, while the location of this pitch i...

Comparing auditory sustained attention in children with auditory processing disorder and normal children

Introduction: Auditory processing disorder (APD) is a type of abnormal perceptual processing of auditory information within the central auditory nervous system that could be influenced by cognitive factors, such as attention. Attention is one of most important cognitive functions in the development of learning in children, so it is important to recognize and evaluate a variety of attention defi...