title: Within-channel selection and event-related potentials during selective auditory attention.
abstract: Event-related potentials were recorded from subjects who listened selectively to stimuli in one of two input channels (ears). The stimuli were random sequences of five vowels and a tone pip. In separate experimental runs, the difficulty of within-channel selection was manipulated by designating either tone (T), one vowel (1V), or two vowels (2V) as targets. An attention-related negativity (Nd) was observed for attended nontarget vowels irrespective of the target difficulty, but the early, centrally maximal phase of Nd was substantial only for the one-vowel and two-vowel conditions. The Nd between its early and late peaks was significantly larger for the two-vowel condition than for the one-vowel and tone conditions. The 2V minus 1V difference in Nd had a closely similar distribution to the early Nd. These target difficulty effects were interpreted as suggesting that the early Nd recorded in two-selection tasks can be related to a within-channel selection process as well as a between-channel selection process. The more anteriorly distributed, later phase of Nd was suggested to be rather insensitive to the difficulty of the within-channel selection. The nature of the within-channel selection underlying the early Nd was discussed in relation to controlled memory search operations.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Okita
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D011930:Reaction Time; D013067:Speech Perception