Daly Heather R, Pitt Mark A
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2023 Apr;85(3):879-888. doi: 10.3758/s13414-023-02683-8. Epub 2023 Mar 14.
Auditory selective attention is thought to consist of two mechanisms: an enhancement mechanism that boosts the target signal, and a suppression mechanism that attenuates concurrent distracting signals. The current study explored the conditions necessary to observe enhancement of predictable auditory objects. Participants heard scenes consisting of three voices and a distracting noise. They were asked to find the gender singleton (target) and report whether it was saying even or odd numbers. One of the voices appeared as the high-probability target (70%) across trials. We expected responses to be faster when the high-probability target was in the scene, and results from Experiment 1 supported that prediction. However, this target enhancement effect was substantially weakened when a distracting noise was also in the scene, suggesting that the distractor captured attention and interfered with enhancement. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that distractor predictability modulates target enhancement by varying the probability of the distractor. Although this hypothesis was not supported, the results of Experiment 1 were replicated. Findings support the existence of an easily disruptable enhancement mechanism that boosts the representation of highly probable target objects.
一种增强机制，用于增强目标信号；另一种抑制机制，用于减弱同时出现的干扰信号。当前的研究探讨了观察可预测听觉对象增强所需的条件。参与者听取了由三个声音和一个干扰噪声组成的场景。他们被要求找出性别单一的声音（目标），并报告其说的是偶数还是奇数。在所有试验中，其中一个声音作为高概率目标（70%）出现。我们预期当高概率目标出现在场景中时，反应会更快，实验1的结果支持了这一预测。然而，当场景中也存在干扰噪声时，这种目标增强效应会大幅减弱，这表明干扰因素吸引了注意力并干扰了增强效果。实验2通过改变干扰因素的概率来检验干扰因素可预测性调节目标增强的假设。尽管这一假设未得到支持，但实验1的结果得到了重复验证。研究结果支持存在一种易于被破坏的增强机制，该机制可增强高概率目标对象的表征。
