Name:Yimeng, Wang

School/Affiliation:University of Toronto Mississauga

Co-Authors:Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden

Virtual or In-person:Virtual

Abstract:

How do we detect changes in busy sound scenes? Do we need time to guide or attention to the sound or recognize the sounds before we can detect a change? Few studies explore the temporal dynamics of change detection in busy listening environments where speech and meaningful non-speech sounds (e.g., dog bark, train whistle, musical instrument) overlap. We use a change deafness paradigm to manipulate when sound changes occur over the course of a single 4-second scene. Participants are asked to detect whether one of four separate sounds (i.e., speech, musical instrument, animal, environmental) played simultaneously changed (volume increase or decrease). Changes were pseudo-randomly spaced in time to examine whether volume changes are better detected after participants have had time to recognize the sound (>500ms) or sufficient time to evaluate the volume decrease (>500ms before the end of the scene). Accuracy and reaction time will be averaged over sliding windows to assess the temporal dynamics of change detection. For the time-course analyses, we predict that there will be an inverted u-shape over the course of the trial, with poor change detection for the 500ms after onset and 500ms preceding the offset and a mid-point when people are skilled at detecting changes. Understanding the temporal dynamics of recognition clarifies whether listeners require sufficient time to recognize sounds before they change in a busy listening setting that mimics the real world.