Subject: Re: attention From: Malcolm Slaney <malcolm(at)INTERVAL.COM> Date: Mon, 14 Nov 1994 22:43:46 -0800At 3:56 PM 11/14/94, Dan Freed wrote: >When you say that studies have not been able to show an auditory orientation >effect analogous to the visual one, are you referring only to spatial >orientation? What about a frequency orientation effect? For that matter, >is there a spatial frequency orientation effect in vision? Yes, you're right.... I was only referring to spatial orienting using auditory cues. I wasn't very clear in my abstract. There are of course many things that can successfully cue a auditory task. The paper we're going to discuss only talks about spatial orientation. -- Malcolm P.S. For the list members... I'm not sure how this note ended up on the Auditory list. My quote came from the Stanford Hearing Seminar mailing list. This week's discussion is on the paper referenced below. Does anybody have any comments on the paper? I've heard people claim that binaural hearing provides an extra margin of a few dB in the "cocktail party" problem. Spatial (auditory) orienting seems to provide a small performance improvement. Is this all it takes? Charles J. Spence and Jon Driver (Cambridge England), "Covert Spatial Orientation in Audition: Exogeneous and Endogenous Mechanisms," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1994, Vol. 20, No. 3, 555-574. ABSTRACT: Covert orienting in hearing was examined by presenting auditory spatial cues prior to an auditory target, requiring either a choice or detection response. Targets and cues appeared on the left or right of Ss' midline. Localization of the target in orthogonal directions (up vs down or front vs back, independent of target side) was faster when cue and target appeared on the same rather than opposite sides. This benefit was larger and more durable when the cue predicted target side. These effects cannot reflect criterion shifts, suggesting that covert orienting enhances auditory localization. Fine frequency discriminations also benefited from predictive spatial cues, although uninformative cues only affected spatial discriminations. No cuing effects were observed in a detection task.