Slow change deafness.

In four experiments, we demonstrated a new phenomenon called "slow-change deafness." In Experiment 1 we presented listeners with continuous speech that changed three semitones in pitch over time, and we found that nearly 50 % failed to notice the change. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the finding, demonstrated that the changes in the stimuli were well above threshold, and showed that when listeners were alerted to the possibility of a change, detection rates improved dramatically. Experiment 4 showed that increasing the magnitude of the change that occurred in the stimulus decreased the rate of change deafness. Our results are consistent with previous work that had shown that cueing listeners to potential auditory changes can significantly reduce change deafness. These findings support an account of change deafness that is dependent on both the magnitude of a stimulus change and listener expectations.

Inattentional blindness for a noxious multimodal stimulus.

Previous research has shown that people can miss salient stimuli outside the focus of their attention. This phenomenon, called inattentional blindness, typically is observed when people are given a task requiring them to focus their attention on one aspect of a complex visual scene. While participants are doing this task, an unexpected stimulus appears, and participants' awareness of it is tested shortly thereafter. In the present experiments, noxious bimodal stimuli were used as a test case to measure the strength of inattentional blindness. We tested whether participants would notice a person enter a scene and scratch her fingernails down a chalkboard (thus making a sound called a "gride"). A large proportion of participants failed to detect this event even when the noxious audio associated with it was strengthened and isolated in time from surrounding noises.

Pitch and loudness interact in auditory displays: can the data get lost in the map?

Many auditory displays use acoustic attributes such as frequency, intensity, and spectral content to represent different characteristics of multidimensional data. This study demonstrated a perceptual interaction between dynamic changes in pitch and loudness, as well as perceived asymmetries in directional acoustic change, that distorted the data relations represented in an auditory display. Three experiments showed that changes in loudness can influence pitch change, that changes in pitch can influence loudness change, and that increases in acoustic intensity are judged to change more than equivalent decreases. Within a sonification of stock market data, these characteristics created perceptual distortions in the data set. The results suggest that great care should be exercised when using lower level acoustic dimensions to represent multidimensional data.