Jenna Green, “Can Humans Direct Selective Attention to Auditory Objects?”
Mentor: Adam Greenberg, Psychology
Poster #78

Attentional selection is the process by which we are able to filter out irrelevant information (i.e., distractors) in our environment and focus only on the information pertinent to our current behavioral goals (i.e., targets). The majority of work in this field explores attentional selection in the visuo-spatial domain; examining the limits of our filtering system when targets and distractors are distinguished based on their spatial locations. However, attention can also select information on the basis of objectness (i.e., when target and distractor items occupy overlapping spatial locations) which we call object-based attention (OBA). In visual processing of everyday life, it has been shown that attention often involves a combination of both spatial and object-based elements. Previous auditory attention studies have found evidence for object-based attention in the auditory domain but have not fully accounted for the influence of spatial distance between stimuli in their design. The goal of this study is to determine whether or not OBA can be observed in the auditory domain via the same (or similar) process that has been observed in the visual domain. Specifically, we will account for the auditory “space” between objects, with auditory space being measured in logarithmic frequency. The study is currently ongoing, but we have observed intriguing trends in the data providing evidence of an object-based component to auditory attention. Understanding the mechanisms of auditory attention has many practical applications (e.g., conversations in a noisy environment) and could help to better address the needs of people with disorders such as ADHD.