Roberts Katherine L, Summerfield A Quentin, Hall Deborah A
Medical Research Council, Institute of Hearing Research, University Park, Nottingham, UK.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2009 Aug;35(4):1178-91. doi: 10.1037/a0014249.
The spatial relevance hypothesis (J. J. McDonald & L. M. Ward, 1999) proposes that covert auditory spatial orienting can only be beneficial to auditory processing when task stimuli are encoded spatially. We present a series of experiments that evaluate 2 key aspects of the hypothesis: (a) that "reflexive activation of location-sensitive neurons is not sufficient to produce attentional facilitation" and (b) that "any task constraint that makes space important for the listener will produce auditory spatial cue effects" (p. 1236). Experiment 1 showed significant reflexive-orienting benefits on a nonspatial task, refuting the first claim. However, Experiments 2 to 4 reveal that informative spatial cues can improve performance on a nonspatial task, consistent with the second claim. Auditory spatial-cue benefits found with nonspatial tasks appear smaller and less reliable than those found in visual spatial-orienting studies, possibly due to differences in the coding of spatial information in vision and audition. The final experiments consider the mechanisms by which auditory spatial orienting might facilitate auditory processing and provide tentative evidence that attention enhances processing at one ear rather than influencing neurons tuned to the attended location.
空间相关性假说（J. J. 麦克唐纳和L. M. 沃德，1999）提出，只有当任务刺激在空间上被编码时，隐蔽听觉空间定向才会对听觉加工有益。我们进行了一系列实验来评估该假说的两个关键方面：（a）“位置敏感神经元的反射性激活不足以产生注意促进作用”，以及（b）“任何使空间对听者很重要的任务限制都会产生听觉空间线索效应”（第1236页）。实验1表明在非空间任务上存在显著的反射性定向益处，这反驳了第一个观点。然而，实验2至4表明，信息性空间线索可以提高非空间任务的表现，这与第二个观点一致。在非空间任务中发现的听觉空间线索益处似乎比视觉空间定向研究中发现的益处更小且更不可靠，这可能是由于视觉和听觉中空间信息编码的差异。最后的实验考虑了听觉空间定向可能促进听觉加工的机制，并提供了初步证据，表明注意增强了一只耳朵的加工，而不是影响调谐到被注意位置的神经元。
