Competition between auditory and visual spatial cues during visual task performance

There is debate in the crossmodal cueing literature as to whether capture of visual attention by means of sound is a fully automatic process. Recent studies show that when visual attention is endogenously focused sound still captures attention. The current study investigated whether there is interaction between exogenous auditory and visual...

Priming T2 in a Visual and Auditory Attentional Blink Task

Participants performed an attentional blink (AB) task including digits as targets and letters as distractors within the visual and auditory domains. Prior to the rapid serial visual presentation, a visual or auditory prime was presented in the form of a digit that was identical to the second target (T2) on 50% of the trials. In addition to the ...

Study of an automated procedure for a Dutch sentence test for the measurement of the speech reception threshold in noise

A procedure was developed for the automated measurement of the speech reception threshold in stationary noise (SRTn), which can be administered by the subjects themselves using a computer. The procedure was based on the SRTn test for Dutch developed by Plomp and Mimpen [(1979). “Improving the reliability of testing the speech reception threshold...

Audiovisual events capture attention: Evidence from temporal order judgments

Is an irrelevant audiovisual event able to guide attention automatically? In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked to make a temporal order judgment (TOJ) about which of two dots (left or right) appeared first. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to make a simultaneity judgment (SJ) instead. Such tasks have been shown to be affected...

The absence of an auditory-visual attentional blink is not due to echoic memory

The second of two targets is often missed when presented shortly after the first target—a phenomenon referred to as the attentional blink (AB). Whereas the AB is a robust phenomenon within sensory modalities, the evidence for cross-modal ABs is rather mixed. Here, we test the possibility that the absence of an auditory–visual AB for visual...

Theoretical feasibility of suppressing offensive sports chants by means of delayed feedback of sound

A novel approach for disrupting offensive chants at sporting events is proposed, based on attacking synchronization between individuals. Since timing is crucial for coordination between chanters, disruption of timing is expected to be effective against undesired chants. Delayed auditory feedback is known to disrupt timing in individual sound...

Advances in research on spatial and binaural hearing

The advanced developments in research on spatial and binaural auditory perception, were described. The research on sound localization revealed one important development of virtual acoustic space (VAS) as a research tool. Sound sources in VAS can be repositioned in other acoustic environments. The second research area included sound segregation,...

Relationship between exposure to multiple noise sources and noise annoyance

Relationships between exposure to noise [metric: day-night level (DNL) or day-evening-night level (DENL)] from a single source (aircraft, road traffic, or railways) and annoyance based on a large international dataset have been published earlier. Also for stationary sources relationships have been assessed. Here the annoyance equivalents model...

Annoyance caused by the sounds of a magnetic levitation train

In a laboratory study, the annoyance caused by the passby sounds from a magnetic levitation (maglev) train was investigated. The listeners were presented with various sound fragments. The task of the listeners was to respond after each presentation to the question: "How annoying would you find the sound in the preceding period if you were...

Sound localization in the presence of one or two distracters

Localizing a target sound can be a challenge when one or more distracter sounds are present at the same time. This study measured the effect of distracter position on target localization for one distracter (17 positions) and two distracters (21 combinations of 17 positions). Listeners were instructed to point to the apparent position of a train...

Community reaction to aircraft noise: Time-of-day penalty and tradeoff between levels of overflights

A decrease in the level of sound events can compensate for an increase in the level of other events, but noise metrics assume different tradeoffs. Noise metrics also differ in the penalty applied to noise in the evening and to noise in the night, and in the definition of these periods. These two aspects of noise metrics, i.e., the tradeoff and...

Exposure-response relationships for transportation noise

This article presents synthesis curves for the relationship between DNL and percentage highly annoyed for three transportation noise sources. The results are based on all 21 datasets examined by Schultz [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 64, 377-405 (1978)] and Fidell et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 221-233 (1991)] for which acceptable DNL and percentage...

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Some effects of cognitive similarity on proactive and retriactive interference in short-term memory

An experiment is reported on the effects of cognitive similarity on proactive and retroactive interference (PI, RI) in short term memory. To avoid confounding between cognitive and acoustic similarity, the materials - i.e. words and digits - were matched with respect to vowel pattern. Effects of both PI and RI were found on recall of words,...