Acoustic change detection may improve when listeners do not attend to the stimulus

Evidence

Attention was not controlled for in the present setting, although subjects were instructed to attend to the stimulus. Some subjects reported improved detection of change, when not attending to the stimulus, suggesting that a dual-task paradigm would be interesting where attention can be assessed and controlled. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3345

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: The counterintuitive report that unattended listening improves change detection is worth pursuing — could connect to preattentive/statistical-learning mechanisms in auditory texture perception.

Related

• Some listeners detect texture changes more readily when not actively attending (similarity 0.93)
• Incidental attention may improve detection of statistical change in sound textures (similarity 0.90)
• Incidental listening may improve statistical change detection over attention (similarity 0.90)
• Change detection in statistical sounds relies on predicting statistics rather than exact occurrences (similarity 0.83)
• Appearance of a change is more salient than its removal in complex acoustic stimuli (similarity 0.82)
• Difficult change-detection tasks exclude some normal-hearing listeners entirely (similarity 0.81)
• Listeners can detect changes in the probability statistics of continuous acoustic textures (similarity 0.80)
• Time available for integrating evidence is the main predictor of change detection success (similarity 0.79)
• Detecting statistical changes in sound improves with listening time and change size (similarity 0.79)
• Larger statistical changes produce faster and more certain auditory detection (similarity 0.79)
• Human change detection follows a statistical-integration model as estimation precision improves with observation (similarity 0.79)
• Listeners detect statistical changes in ongoing sound based on time available for evidence integration (similarity 0.79)
• Change-detection sensitivity rises with observation time but stays low for small changes. (similarity 0.79)
• Change detection in stochastic textures depends on statistical prediction rather than spectrotemporal predictability (similarity 0.79)
• Listeners base perceived loudness on sounds they attend to, ignoring others (similarity 0.79)