Facilitative and inhibitory effects of cuing sound duration, intensity, and timbre.
Two experiments are reported in which the possibility that auditory attention may be controlled in a stimulus-driven manner by duration, intensity, and timbre cues was examined. In both experiments, listeners were presented with a cue followed, after a variable time period of a 150-, 450-, or 750-msec stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), by a target. In three different conditions for each experiment, the duration, intensity, or timbre relation between the cue and the target was varied so that, on 50% of the trials, the two sounds were identical and, on 50% of the trials, the two sounds were different in the manipulated feature. The two experiments differed only in the judgment required, with listeners in Experiment 1 identifying the duration, intensity, or timbre of the target and listeners in Experiment 2 indicating whether the target incorporated a brief silent gap. In both experiments, performance was observed to depend on both the similarity of and the time between the cue and the target. Specifically, whereas at the 150-msec SOA performance was best when the target was identical to the preceding cue, at the 750-msec SOA performance was best when the cue and the target differed. This pattern establishes the existence of duration-, intensity-, and timbre-based auditory inhibition of return. The theoretical implications of these results are considered.
Mondor
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Department of Psychology, Duff Roblin Bldg., University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada. todd_mondor@umanitoba.ca
Lacey
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D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011571:Psychoacoustics