Abstract
Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio A priori information about the location of the target talker plays a critical role incocktail party listening tasks, but little is known about the influence of imperfect spatial information in situations in which the listener has some knowledge about the location of the target speech but does not know its exact location prior to hearing the stimulus. In this study, spatial uncertainty was varied by adjusting the probability that the target talker in a multitalker stimulus would change locations at the end of each trial. The results show that listeners can adapt their strategies according to the statistical properties of a dynamic acoustic environment but that this adaptation is a relatively slow process that may require dozens of trials to complete.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Best, V. (2004).Spatial hearing with simultaneous sound sources: A psychophysical investigation. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sydney.
Bolia, R. S., Nelson, W. T., Ericson, M. A., &Simpson, B. D. (2000). A speech corpus for multitalker communications research.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,107, 1065–1066.
Bolia, R. S., Nelson, W. T., &Morley, R. M. (2001). Asymmetric performance in the cocktail party effect: Implications for the design of spatial audio displays.Human Factors,43, 208–216.
Broadbent, D. E. (1958).Perception and communication. New York: Pergamon.
Broca, P. (1861). Nouvelle observation daphémie produite par une lésion de la moitié postérieure des deuxième et troisième circonvolutions frontales gauches [New observations of aphemia produced by a lesion of the posterior half of the second and third left frontal circumvolutions].Bulletins de la Société Anatomique de Paris,36, 398–407.
Brungart, D. S. (2001a). Evaluation of speech intelligibility with the coordinate response measure.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,109, 2276–2279.
Brungart, D. S. (2001b). Informational and energetic masking effects in the perception of two simultaneous talkers.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,109, 1101–1109.
Brungart, D. S., Ericson, M. A., & Simpson, B. D. (2002). Design considerations for improving the effectiveness of multitalker speech displays. InProceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2002) (pp. 169-174). Kyoto.
Brungart, D. S., &Simpson, B. D. (2002). The effects of spatial separation in distance on the informational and energetic masking of a nearby speech signal.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,112, 664–676.
Brungart, D. S., & Simpson, B. D. (2003). Optimizing the spatial configuration of a seven-talker speech display. InProceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (pp. 188-191). Boston.
Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,25, 975–979.
Crispien, K., &Ehrenberg, T. (1995). Evaluation of the “cocktail party effect” for multiple speech stimuli within a spatial audio display.Journal of the Audio Engineering Society,43, 932–940.
Drullman, R., &Bronkhorst, A. W. (2000). Multichannel speech intelligibility and talker recognition using monaural, binaural, and three-dimensional auditory presentation.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,107, 2224–2235.
Ericson, M. A., Brungart, D. S., &Simpson, B. D. (2004). Factors that influence intelligibility in multitalker speech displays.Journal of Aviation Psychology,14, 313–334.
Hawley, M. L., Litovsky, R. Y., &Colburn, H. S. (1999). Speech intelligibility and localization in a multi-source environment.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,105, 3436–3448.
Hawley, M. L., Litovsky, R. Y., &Culling, J. F. (2004). The benefit of binaural hearing in a cocktail party: Effect of location and type of interferer.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,115, 833–843.
Hirsh, I. J. (1950). Relation between localization and intelligibility.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,22, 196–200.
Howard-Jones, P. A., &Rosen, S. (1993). Uncomodulated glimpsing in “checkerboard” noise.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,93, 2915–2922.
Kidd, G., Jr.,Arbogast, T. L., Mason, C. R., &Gallun, F. J. (2005). The advantage of knowing where to listen.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,118, 3804–3815.
Kimura, D. (1961). Some effects of temporal-lobe damage on auditory perception.Canadian Journal of Psychology,15, 156–165.
Koehnke, J., Besing, J. M., Abouchacra, K. S., & Tran, T. V. (1998). Speech recognition for known and unknown target message locations. InProceedings of the 1998 Midwinter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. St. Petersburg, FL.
Moray, N. (1959). Attention in dichotic listening: Affective cues and the influence of instructions.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,11, 56–60.
Nelson, W. T., Bolia, R. S., Ericson, M. A., &McKinley, R. L. (1999). Spatial audio displays for speech communication: A comparison of free-field and virtual sources. InProceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 43rd Annual Meeting (pp. 1202–1205). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors & Ergonomics Society.
Rhodes, G. (1987). Auditory attention and the representation of spatial information.Perception & Psychophysics,42, 1–14.
Shinn-Cunningham, B. G., & Ihlefeld, A. (2004). Selective and divided attention: Extracting information from simultaneous sound sources. InProceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display. Sydney
Shinn-Cunningham, B. G., Schickler, J., Kopco, N., &Litovsky, R. (2001). Spatial unmasking of nearby speech sources in a simulated anechoic environment.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,110, 1118–1129.
Spieth, W., Curtis, J. F., &Webster, J. C. (1954). Responding to one of two simultaneous messages.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,26, 391–396.
Tipper, S. P., Brehaut, J. C., &Driver, J. (1990). Selection of moving and static objects for the control of spatially directed action.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,16, 492–504.
Treisman, A. M. (1964). Verbal cues, language, and meaning in selective attention.American Journal of Psychology,77, 206–219.
Wenzel, E. M., Arruda, M., Kistler, D. J., &Wightman, F. L. (1993). Localization using non-individualized head-related transfer functions.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,94, 111–123.
Wightman, F. L., &Kistler, D. J. (1989a). Headphone simulation of free-field listening: I. Stimulus synthesis.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,85, 858–867.
Wightman, F. L., &Kistler, D. J. (1989b). Headphone simulation of free-field listening: II. Psychophysical validation.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,85, 868–878.
Yost, W. A., Dye, R. H., Jr., &Sheft, S. (1996). A simulated cocktail party with up to three sound sources.Perception & Psychophysics,58, 1026–1036.
Zurek, P. M. (1993). Binaural advantages and directional effects in speech intelligibility. In G. A. Studebaker & I. Hochberg (Eds.),Acoustical factors affecting hearing aid performance (2nd ed., pp. 255–276). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Portions of this research were supported by AFOSR Grant 01-HE-01-COR.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brungart, D.S., Simpson, B.D. Cocktail party listening in a dynamic multitalker environment. Perception & Psychophysics 69, 79–91 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194455
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194455