title: Preattentive auditory context effects.
abstract: The effects of auditory context on the preattentive and perceptual organization of tone sequences were investigated. Two sets of experiments were conducted in which the pitch of contextual tones was varied, bringing about two different contextual manipulations. Preattentive auditory organization was indexed by the mismatch negativity event-related potential, which is elicited by violations of auditory regularities even when participants ignore the sounds (e.g., by reading a book). The perceptual effects of the contextual manipulations on auditory grouping were assessed using target-detection and order-judgment tasks. The close correspondence found between the effects of auditory context on the perceptual and preattentive measures of auditory grouping suggests that a large part of contextual processing is preattentive.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. winkler@cogpsyphy.hu
authors.forename: István
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Winkler
authors.forename: Elyse
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Sussman
authors.forename: Mari
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tervaniemi
authors.forename: János
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Horváth
authors.forename: Walter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ritter
authors.forename: Risto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Näätänen
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000523:psychology; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values