title: Enhanced sensory processing accompanies successful detection of change for real-world sounds.
abstract: Change deafness is the inability of listeners to detect changes occurring in their auditory environment. It is a matter of some debate whether change deafness occurs because of a failure of auditory-specific processes or a failure of more general semantic/verbal memory. To address this issue, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to pairs of scenes consisting of naturalistic auditory objects while listeners made a same/different judgment for scenes presented before and after an interruption. ERPs to the post-change scene revealed an enhanced early sensory response (N1) and an enhanced late positivity (P3) for detected changes. Change detection performance was better when there was a large acoustic spread among the objects within Scenes 1 and 2, suggesting that the deficits reflected by the ERP components during change deafness are related to successfully segregating the pre- and post-change objects. We also found that a separate sensory response (P2) reflects implicit, unconscious change detection. Overall, the results provide evidence that auditory-specific sensory processing is critical for both explicit and implicit change detection in natural auditory scenes.
authors.affiliation: University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA. melissa.gregg@unlv.edu
authors.forename: Melissa K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Gregg
authors.forename: Joel S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Snyder
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult