LAUSR

By directing auditory selective attention, humans can recognize a target sound from multiple environmental sounds. Evidence suggests that the effect of auditory selective attention is observed not only in the frequency domain, but also in the spatial domain. However, the effect of auditory spatial attention is not always observed and has been suggested to depend on the level of auditory processing. Therefore, the task dependency of auditory spatial attention was investigated by measuring the word intelligibility and detection threshold of target 1/12 octave-band noise amongst those with different center frequencies. Target and distractor sounds were presented by a loudspeaker array surrounding listeners. The target sound was presented after listeners' auditory attention was attracted to the specific direction from which the target sounds would be presented. Results showed that the word intelligibility increased when attended but the detection threshold of narrow-band noises did not change significantly. This suggests that auditory processing higher than that required for detecting a specific random noise among spatially distributed similar noises is necessary for the effect auditory spatial attention to appear. It seems interesting to pursue the lowest level, where the effects of auditory spatial attention are observable.By directing auditory selective attention, humans can recognize a target sound from multiple environmental sounds. Evidence suggests that the effect of auditory selective attention is observed not only in the frequency domain, but also in the spatial domain. However, the effect of auditory spatial attention is not always observed and has been suggested to depend on the level of auditory processing. Therefore, the task dependency of auditory spatial attention was investigated by measuring the word intelligibility and detection threshold of target 1/12 octave-band noise amongst those with different center frequencies. Target and distractor sounds were presented by a loudspeaker array surrounding listeners. The target sound was presented after listeners' auditory attention was attracted to the specific direction from which the target sounds would be presented. Results showed that the word intelligibility increased when attended but the detection threshold of narrow-band noises did not change significantly. T...