Listening Costs Associated With Shifts In Auditory Spatial Attention
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1
University of Sydney, Australia
Following a multi-talker conversation relies on the ability to rapidly and efficiently shift spatial attention from one talker to another. Many studies have examined the cocktail party problem from a static perspective but little is known about the top-down cognitive effort involved in conversational turn taking. The current study investigated the listening costs associated with shifts in spatial attention in 13 normal hearing listeners, using a novel sentence comprehension task. Three pairs of semantically correct 5 word sentences, recorded from a single male talker, were presented concurrently through an array of three loudspeakers. Subjects attended to one spatial location, primed by a tone, and followed the target conversation from one sentence to the next using the call-sign at the beginning of each sentence. Subjects repeated back the last three words of each sentence (echoic recall task) or answered a multiple choice question related to the target sentences (semantic task). There was a 10.9±1.4% decrease in word recall (p<0.05) and a pronounced primacy effect when the location changed between sentences. Switching costs were independent of the distance and direction of the spatial shift. Word recall decreased and response time increased systematically under higher cognitive load as question difficulty increased. Switching costs were negatively correlated with an individual's working memory capacity, which was assessed using a reading span test. Overall, this study highlights i) the listening costs associated with shifts in spatial attention and ii) the important role of working memory in maintaining goal relevant information and extracting meaning from dynamic multi-talker conversations.
Keywords:
working memory,
spatial attention,
cocktail party problem,
Cognitive Load,
Switching cost
Conference:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Lin
G and
Carlile
S
(2015). Listening Costs Associated With Shifts In Auditory Spatial Attention.
Conference Abstract:
XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00236
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Received:
19 Feb 2015;
Published Online:
24 Apr 2015.
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Correspondence:
Mr. Gaven Lin, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, gavenlin@gmail.com