Temporal characteristics of auditory spatial attention on word intelligibility

Allocation of attention during auditory word learning

The deployment of selective attention has been studied in depth as a mechanism of visual categorization for decades. However, little work has investigated how attentional mechanisms operate for non-visual domains, and many models of categorization tacitly presume domain-general attention use. In three experiments, we investigated whether learners deploy attention to novel auditory features when...

Temporal jitter disrupts speech intelligibility: a simulation of auditory aging.

We disrupted periodicity cues by temporally jittering the speech signal to explore how such distortion might affect word identification. Jittering distorts the fine structure of the speech signal with negligible alteration of either its long-term spectral or amplitude envelope characteristics. In Experiment 1, word identification in noise was significantly reduced in young, normal-hearing adult...

Computational modeling of auditory spatial attention

Attention plays a fundamental role in higher-level cognition. In this paper we develop a computational model for how auditory spatial attention is distributed in space. Our model builds on the assumption that attentional bias has bottom-up and top-down components. We represent each component and their synthesis as a map, associating a level of attentional bias to locations in space. The maps an...

The effect of exogenous spatial attention on auditory information processing.

This study investigated the effect of exogenous spatial attention on auditory information processing. In Experiments 1, 2 and 3, temporal order judgment tasks were performed to examine the effect. In Experiment 1 and 2, a cue tone was presented to either the left or right ear, followed by sequential presentation of two target tones. The subjects judged the order of presentation of the target to...

Effects of Long Term Memory on Auditory Spatial Attention