Jones Pete R, Moore David R, Amitay Sygal
MRC Institute of Hearing Research.
Dev Psychol. 2015 Mar;51(3):353-69. doi: 10.1037/a0038570.
Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were influenced by (i.e., gave weight to) each spectral region of the stimulus. Psychometric fits were also used to estimate levels of internal noise and bias. Levels of masking were found to decrease with age, becoming adult-like by 9-11 years. This change was explained by improvements in selective attention alone, with older listeners better able to ignore noise similar in frequency to the target. Consistent with this, age-related differences in masking were abolished when the noise was made more distant in frequency to the target. This work offers novel evidence that improvements in selective attention are critical for the normal development of auditory judgments.
在存在不可预测的噪音时，儿童的听力会显著下降。为探究其中原因，187名学龄儿童（4至11岁）和15名成年人进行了一项噪声中纯音检测任务，在每次呈现时，掩蔽噪声会随机变化。通过测量听众受刺激的每个频谱区域影响的程度（即给予权重）来评估选择性注意力。心理测量拟合也用于估计内部噪声和偏差水平。发现掩蔽水平随年龄增长而降低，到9至11岁时变得与成年人相似。这种变化仅通过选择性注意力的改善来解释，年龄较大的听众更能忽略与目标频率相似的噪声。与此一致的是，当噪声在频率上与目标的距离更远时，掩蔽方面与年龄相关的差异就消失了。这项研究提供了新的证据，表明选择性注意力的改善对于听觉判断的正常发展至关重要。
