| Abstract: | Listening differs from hearing just as looking differs from seeing. Listening and looking imply an active, conscious attention to sound or sight, often to particular stimuli. Whereas looking is made obvious by eye or head movement, listening usually involves a more subtle, internal setting. Such selective listening is frequently cited with respect to the so-called cocktail-party effect, the ability to pick out and attend to one of many talkers. In this article, the author does not deal directly with the cocktail-party effect, but presents data to show how attention and expectation affect the processing of simple sounds. These are first steps toward an analytic understanding of the psychophysical bases of the selective attention to one sound among many. Selective listening benefits the detection of sounds in an attended spectral region, but has little effect on the detection of sounds coming from an attended spatial region or in an attended temporal pattern. As to its effect on auditory discrimination and recognition, we know only that selective listening speeds the discrimination of sounds from an attended direction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
