title: Auditory objects of attention: the role of interaural time differences.
abstract: The role of interaural time difference (ITD) in perceptual grouping and selective attention was explored in 3 experiments. Experiment 1 showed that listeners can use small differences in ITD between 2 sentences to say which of 2 short, constant target words was part of the attended sentence, in the absence of talker or fundamental frequency differences. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that listeners do not explicitly track components that share a common ITD. Their inability to segregate a harmonic from a target vowel by a difference in ITD was not substantially changed by the vowel being placed in a sentence context, where the sentence shared the same ITD as the rest of the vowel. The results indicate that in following a particular auditory sound source over time, listeners attend to perceived auditory objects at particular azimuthal positions rather than attend explicitly to those frequency components that share a common ITD.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England. cjd@biols.susx.ac.uk
authors.forename: C J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Darwin
authors.forename: R W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Hukin
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors