Abstract 177, Date 1:00 pm, Tuesday, February 17, 2009 (24 hours) Session R13: Poster
Exploring How Auditory Spatial Continuity Enhances Speech Perception
*Erol J. Ozmeral, Virginia Best, Chloe McGuffin, Brenden Hurd, Norbert Kopco, Barbara G. Shinn-Cunningham
Continuity of spatial location was recently shown to improve the ability to identify and recall a sequence of target digits presented in a mixture of confusable maskers (Best et al 2008). Here we present three follow-up experiments that explored the basis of this improvement. First, we trained listeners with the spatial trajectory of a moving sequence of digits to examine whether advance knowledge of upcoming target locations enhanced performance. In the second experiment, we tested whether refinement of spatial selectivity would arise if the target sequence moved but had no discontinuous jumps in location (i.e., the spatial trajectory only included transitions to an adjacent loudspeaker location). Lastly, we examined whether the benefit of spatial continuity was limited to the challenging case in which maskers were all potential targets. The results suggest that improvements in selectivity of spatial attention that arise when the target location is fixed from digit to digit cannot be attributed to a) the ability to plan where to direct attention well in advance; b) a freedom from having to redirect attention across large separations in location; or c) the challenge of filtering out nearby signals that are confusable with the target. [Work supported by ONR and NIDCD] Best V, Ozmeral EJ, Kopco N, and Shinn-Cunningham BG (2008). Object continuity enhances selective auditory attention. PNAS 105(35):13173-13177.