Location and frequency cues in auditory selective attention.
The roles of frequency and location cues in auditory selective attention were investigated in a series of experiments in which target tones were distinguished from distractors by frequency, location, or the conjunction of frequency and location features. When frequency separations in high-rate tone sequences were greater than 1 octave, participants were fastest at identifying targets defined by frequency and were sometimes faster at identifying conjunction than location targets. Frequency salience diminished as filtering demands were reduced: At long interstimulus intervals (> 2.0 s), performance was superior in location conditions. The results suggest that frequency may play a role in auditory selective attention tasks analogous to the role of spatial position in visual attention.
Department of Neurology, University of California, Davis, USA. dlwoods@ucdavis.edu
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D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011897:Random Allocation; D011930:Reaction Time; D013017:Sound Localization / Q000502:physiology*