Attention and respiration audiometry.

The effect of attention on auditory responses obtained with respiration audiometry was examined on twenty normal-hearing adults. Ten subjects were instructed to listen carefully for the auditory stimuli during testing, while the other ten were not instructed. The results revealed that the change in respiration resulting from sound stimuli for the instructed subjects was three times greater than for the uninstructed group during the first 11-tonal sequence. However, during the third sequence, more responses were obtained from the uninstructed subjects. There was little evidence to suggest that the respiratory changes to sound were greater in magnitude or in number as the intensity of the sound approached behavioral threshold. The results suggest that the level of attention affects the number and pattern of respiratory responses to sound.