The Impact of Sound Source Location on Change Deafness

This research project investigated the impact of sound source location on the phenomenon of change deafness. Change deafness occurs when participants listen to multiple sounds in an auditory scene and are unable to identify which sound disappeared from the scene. This phenomenon is exacerbated when the participants must keep track of four or more stimuli simultaneously. However, how the influence of sound source distance on the ability to detect changes in auditory scenes has not been previously investigated in a change deafness task. This is important because in the distance domain, the signal will be degraded by both decreasing level and increasing reverberation at farther source distances. In the present study, participants heard an auditory scene with four different talkers located at different distances. One of the talkers would disappear from the scene at random. The participants’ task was to identify which talker disappeared. It was hypothesized that it would be harder to identify talkers who disappeared from the scene when they were farther away. Results showed that source distance did not affect the ability to detect which talker disappeared from the scene. The results suggest that participants are able to track up to four auditory targets simultaneously in the distance domain, an informative finding that adds to the change deafness and attention processing literature.