Auditory Attention

Have you ever been watching television, talking to someone, or listening to music with other conversations going on in the background? If you tried really hard, you could hear the conversation at hand and background conversations, but more than likely, you had to choose which stimulus to focus on. If you eavesdrop on the background conversations, you will not remember what the characters on television were saying.

• First, we will define auditory attention and selective auditory attention.
• Then, we will review research studies by Colin Cherry and Neville Moray.
• Next, we will look at some problems of those studies.
• We will later look at auditory attention examples.
• Finally, we will review auditory attention tests.

Selective Auditory Attention

The example above shows the concept of auditory attention. Auditory attention is the idea and process by which people can focus on one stimulus and ignore others, despite being exposed to all of them.

Auditory attention is a widely researched cognitive process to understand how selective attention occurs in the auditory system.

Before we explore Neville Moray's findings, some of the most prominent in the field of auditory attention, let's unpack the work he built upon, that of Colin Cherry.

Cherry's (1953) Research on Auditory Attention

Cherry (1953) investigated selective attention to different sounds. Cherry developed two auditory attention test procedures:

1. Mixed speech – participants heard two mixed speeches at the same time. The participant had to shadow and repeat one of the messages.

2. Dichotic listening – a participant listened to a continuous message in one ear and repeated it aloud. A different audio clip was played in the other ear.

In the mixed speech experiment, Cherry found that people had great difficulty distinguishing what they heard. In the shadowing experiment, they could recall more information from the attended message than from the 'rejected' message.

Cherry concluded people decide which auditory stimuli to pay attention to based on physical characteristics such as the gender of the voice or the location of the speaker. He proposed the 'cocktail party effect' to explain how selective attention can shift.

Moray Psychology Research

Neville Moray conducted three experiments to learn more about selective attention. The first experiment was designed to confirm Cherry's (1953) results.

The two later experiments aimed to learn more about the factors influencing selective attention.

Moray Psychology Research 1

The study was conducted in a laboratory and used a repeated measures design. The study used a dichotic listening task – participants heard a message in one ear. In the other ear, a short list of simple words was heard repeatedly (this was the 'rejected' message). The participants were tasked to shadow the message they heard.

Fig. 1. Participants listened to different stimuli in each ear.

The results support Cherry's findings, as more words were recognised from the shadowed message. This finding suggests participants found it difficult to engage with the 'rejected' message.

Moray Psychology Research 2

This experiment recruited 12 participants and was conducted in a laboratory setting using a repeated-measures experimental design. There were ten trials.

A fictional passage was presented in one ear on each trial, and a rejected message was presented in the other; both passages contained instructions. Participants had to shadow the fictional passage and were told not to make mistakes.

The rejected messages played to participants sometimes included the participants' names.

Moray was interested in whether participants would more likely hear and remember the rejected passages if they contained their names.

The study found:

The findings from this experiment may explain the cocktail party effect. The results suggest people shift their attention to a different auditory stimulus when they hear affective cues (a cue that elicits an emotional response) such as their name.

Moray Psychology Research 3

The study was conducted in a laboratory setting and used an independent measures design.

Participants were divided into two groups of 14 subjects each. Dichotic audio clips were played to both groups, and they had to shadow one of the messages they heard.

The tasks given to the participants were:

• Group one answered questions about the shadowed passage at the end of each message.

• Group two was instructed to try and remember all the digits they heard.

The messages varied:

• Some digits were added at the end.

• Some had no digits.

• Some had digits only in the shadowed message.

• Some had digits only in the 'rejected' message.

In the end, participants had to try to recall the digits they could remember. Moray wanted to find out if participants would be more likely to remember the digits if they were asked to look for them specifically.

Interestingly, a t-test revealed no significant difference between the means of the two groups.

The results of Experiment 3 show that nonaffective stimuli (numbers) do not cause people to shift their attention.

Auditory Attention Problems

While two separate researchers have confirmed these findings, there is still low ecological validity. They did the study in a lab. As this is an artificial setting, participants' behaviour may be different than if done in a real-life setting; this reduces the experiment's validity.

Additionally, the sample is non-generalisable. The first study did not describe the sample used. This leaves it impossible to replicate since no one knows the breakdown of the participants. The following two experiments used a small sample. The problem with small samples is that they are not representative of the wider population, leading to generalisability issues.

Auditory Attention Example

Let's take a look at some common auditory attention examples.

• You are at lunch, and there are a bunch of people around. You are conversing with your friend; everyone else around you is background noise. Randomly, you hear someone mention your name from across the room. All of a sudden, you hear that conversation perfectly clear.

• Your dad tells your brother that he can hang out with his friends only if he finishes his chores around the house. Your brother only hears that he can see his friends and promptly leaves.

• Your dog sleeps next to you while you are talking on the phone; she sleeps through the entire call until you say the word "treat." The magical word awakens her from her slumber, and she is now staring at you, waiting for a treat.

Fig. 2. Would the word 'treat' wake your dog up?

Auditory Attention Test

There are times when people, mainly children, need to have their auditory attention tested. Two main tests are used – the Auditory Continuous Performance Test (ACPT) and the Selective Auditory Attention Test (SAAT).

The Auditory Continuous Performance Test is a listening test that instructs the child to raise their thumb when they hear a certain word. There is no background noise during this test to help the child focus. The Selective Auditory Attention Test is similar to the ACPT but also involves pictures during the test.

Auditory attention tests can help determine if someone has an auditory processing disorder (APD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).