Name: selective auditory attention with two ears
Uploaded: 2023-04-30T06:39:01.000Z
Duration: 6 min 14 s
Channel: JoVE

K12 Standards

new-york-state-science-learning-standards

New York State Science Learning Standards

High School

Life Science

Structure and Function

HS-LS1-2.

Dichotic Listening

1. Apparatus and stimuli
<ol>
	<li>Use two sets of headphones and two pieces of hardware for playing auditory stimuli. Ultimately, the experiment requires the ability to play two separate auditory signals through separate headphones. This can be done with a sound mixer or with a computer. But it can be done easily and without technical expertise by using two separate pieces of hardware.</li>
	<li>Select three different recordings with informational content that can be tested for comprehension. These recordings are the stimuli for dichotic listening. Comprehension questions are also necessary.
	<ol>
		<li>A good source for this kind of material is publicly available reading comprehension texts and questions from exams like the Scholastic Aptitude Test. For this demonstration, two pieces of text and their associated questions selected can be found in <a href="https://www.jove.com/files/ftp_upload/10101/Jon_Flombaum_Dichotic_Listening_Appendix_1.pdf" target="_blank">Appendix 1</a>.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Record one person reading each of the selected pieces, and create three individual audio files.</li>
	<li>Print out the questions for each passage for the participant to complete after hearing the relevant recordings.</li>
</ol>
2. Procedure
<ol>
	<li>Keep in mind that the goal of this experiment is to compare the ability to retain information for selectively attended stimuli compared to unattended stimuli. Set up the experiment to include two listening and test sessions.
	<ol>
		<li>The first session is a baseline, with only a single audio passage intended to measure baseline listening comprehension without a second stimulus present.</li>
		<li>The second session involves two different passages played simultaneously, one to each ear, with instructions to attend to one of them.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Explain the instructions for the baseline condition to the participant, as follows:
	<ol>
		<li>&#8220;In a moment, I will ask you to put one headphone in each of your ears. I will press play, and a short passage will be read aloud to you through the headphone in your right ear. Nothing will come from the other. Please pay attention and listen carefully while the passage is read. Afterwards, you will be asked to answer some questions about the passage.&#8221;</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Play one of the passages through the headphone attached to the right ear. For control purposes, the participant should have a headphone in the left ear as well, but nothing should play through it.</li>
	<li>Once the passage has finished playing, give the participant the set of questions associated with it, and allow them 15 min to answer as many as possible.</li>
	<li>For the dichotic condition, explain the procedure to the participant, as follows:
	<ol>
		<li>&#8220;In a moment, I will ask you to place a headphone in each of your ears again. And again, a passage will be read aloud through the headphone played to your right ear. Please play close attention to that passage because you will be asked questions about it after. But this time, a different passage will be read aloud through the headphone in your left ear. You should do your best to ignore that passage, and direct your attention to your right ear.&#8221;</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Once the participant has the headphones placed in their ears, press play simultaneously on each.</li>
	<li>When the passages are done, give the participant the questions for the two passages. They should be in the same document and randomly intermixed. Explain this to the participant:
	<ol>
		<li>&#8220;Now, I&#8217;d like you to answer as many questions as you can about the passages you just heard. About half of the questions are from the passage I asked you to pay attention to. But the other half will be from the other passage. Please do your best. And if you feel like you don&#8217;t know an answer, just guess.&#8221;</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Allow 30 min for the participant to answer the questions. Once the participant has left, score the answers.</li>
	<li>Once the questions are scored, calculate the proportion correct associated with each individual passage. Graph the scores.</li>
</ol>

Dichotic listening has been used for many purposes to understand the nature and capacities of selective attention. For example, it has been used with a concurrent visual task to investigate the extent to which visual and auditory attention compete with one another&#8212;an important issue for understanding when and how humans are able to multitask.
One of the most influential applications of the paradigm has been in the study of the human brain&#8217;s lateralization for processing language. T...

dichotic listening

Source: Laboratory of Jonathan Flombaum&#8212;Johns Hopkins University

It is a well-known fact that the human ability to process incoming stimuli is limited. Nonetheless, the world is complicated, and there are always many things going on at once. Selective attention is the mechanism that allows humans and other animals to control which stimuli get processed and which become ignored. Think of a cocktail party: a person couldn&#8217;t possibly attend to all of the conversations taking place at once. However, everyone has the ability to selectively listen to one conversation, leading all the rest to become unattended to and nothing more than background noise. In order to study how people do this, researchers simulate a more controlled cocktail party environment by playing sounds to participants dichotically, i.e., by playing different sounds simultaneously to each ear. This is called a dichotic listening paradigm.
This experiment demonstrates standard procedures for investigating selective auditory attention with a paradigm called dichotic listening.

The graph in Figure 1 shows the percent of questions answered correctly by condition. The red dotted line (at 20%) shows expected guessing performance (chance), given that each question included five choices. The participant was able to answer more questions correctly for the attended compared to the unattended passage, reflecting the ability to attend selectively to a single stimulus when more than one is present. But the participant also answered more questions correctly in the one passage baseline con...

Source: Laboratory of Jonathan Flombaum&#8212;Johns Hopkins University

It is a well-known fact that the human ability to process incoming stimuli is ...

Dichotic listening is a paradigm used to characterize the nature and capacities of selective attention.Selective attention is the mechanism that allows humans and other animals to control which stimuli are processed and which are ignored.For instance, think of a cocktail party where there are many conversations taking place at once. An individual can focus their attention to listen to only one conversation, which will lead the rest to become nothing more than background noise.This video demonstrates a dichotic listening paradigm, which involves playing different auditory stimuli simultaneously to each ear. You will learn how to design and perform, as well as how to analyze and interpret an experiment investigating selective auditory attention.During this experiment, participants complete two listening sessions: the first measures baseline listening comprehension, and the second involves dichotic listening. Participants are asked to pay attention and listen carefully.For the baseline session, a single passage is played through the headphone attached to the right ear. Nothing is played in the left ear.During the dichotic listening session, one passage is played through the right ear,

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selective auditory attention with two ears

Selective auditory attention lets the brain choose which sounds to process and which to ignore. People and other animals have limited ability to handle incoming stimuli, so attention helps filter a busy world. In a crowded setting, like a cocktail party, a person can focus on one conversation while the others fade into background noise.

Researchers study this ability with a dichotic listening paradigm. In dichotic listening, different sounds are played at the same time to each ear. This creates a controlled version of the cocktail party problem and lets scientists test how people direct attention to one sound stream while another is left unattended.

Selective Auditory Attention with Two Ears

selective-auditory-attention-with-two-ears

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Explore selective auditory attention and the dichotic listening paradigm, where different sounds are played to each ear to study how the brain filters speech in a busy environment.

Selective Auditory Attention with Two Ears | JoVE K12

Jonathan Flombaum

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HS-LS1-1.

Selective Auditory Attention with Two Ears

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