From: malcolm@interval.com (Malcolm Slaney)
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 13:10:51 -0700
Subject: Paying Attention at CCRMA
Message-Id: <aaf016e70a021004b986@[199.170.106.94]>

Don't forget... tomorrow (Thursday's) discussion at the CCRMA Hearing
Seminar will focus on auditory attention.

The announcement I sent earlier was a bit broad.  This paper only deals
with auditory spatial attention. There are many experiments where subjects
show much better performance when they are told what frequency to listen
for.  This paper deals with directing people to listen to sounds in a
particular place in space.  If I tell you that a sound is over on your
left, can you attend to it?  This seems like an important factor for
understanding the "cocktail party effect."

Come to CCRMA to find out more.

-- Malcolm


From: malcolm@interval.com (Malcolm Slaney)
Subject: Auditory Attention at CCRMA

Now pay attention.

This week we'll be talking about auditory attention at the CCRMA Hearing
Seminar.

Historically our group has had a hard time understanding how auditory
attention works.  I've found a couple of papers that talk about the issue,
describe how to measure auditory attention, and what kind of performance to
expect.  This week at the Hearing Seminar I'll be discussing the first
paper.  (Thanks to Neal Bhadkamkar for first showing this paper to me, and
organizing the results.)

Attention helps us to focus on parts of our environment.  It's well known
in vision that orienting a subject can improve their ability to react to a
visual event.  The orienting can either be direct (look here) or indirect
(look over there).  Either way works.  (Oh, the vision people have it so
easy.)

But what about auditory attention?  Previous studies have not shown an
analogous (spatial) effect.  Does this mean that there is no way to orient
a subject with an auditory signal, or we haven't found the right signal.
What is the right way to talk about auditory attention?  What factors
matter?

This week at the CCRMA Hearing Seminar we'll be discussing the following paper:
        Charles J. Spence and Jon Driver (Cambridge England)
        "Covert Spatial Orientation in Audition:
                Exogeneous and Endogenous Mechanisms"
        Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
                1994, Vol. 20, No. 3, 555-574.

I've left copies of the paper in the CCRMA Library.  Or send me a FAX
number if you want a copy (Northern CA people only).  The paper is fairly
dense, the results are not as good as we might hope, but I think this is
important, and will provide a good basis for further work.

        Who:    Malcolm Slaney
        What:   Auditory Attention
        When:   Thursday November 17, 11AM
        Where:  CCRMA Library (Top Floor of the Knoll)

See you at CCRMA.  Let's all figure out what auditory attention is!

-- Malcolm

ABSTRACT:  Covert orienting in hearing was examined by presenting auditory
   spatial cues prior to an auditory target, requiring either a choice or
   detection response. Targets and cues appeared on the left or right of Ss'
   midline. Localization of the target in orthogonal directions (up vs down or
   front vs back, independent of target side) was faster when cue and target
   appeared on the same rather than opposite sides. This benefit was larger and
   more durable when the cue predicted target side. These effects cannot
   reflect criterion shifts, suggesting that covert orienting enhances auditory
   localization. Fine frequency discriminations also benefited from predictive
   spatial cues, although uninformative cues only affected spatial
   discriminations. No cuing effects were observed in a detection task.