Abstract
Recent auditory research using sequentially presented, spatially fixed tones has found evidence that, as in vision for simultaneous, spatially distributed objects, attention appears to be important for the integration of perceptual features that enable the identification of auditory events. The present investigation extended these findings to arrays of simultaneously presented, spatially distributed musical tones. In the primary tasks, listeners were required to search for specific cued conjunctions of values for the features of pitch and instrument timbre. In secondary tasks, listeners were required to search for a single cued value of either the pitch or the timbre feature. In the primary tasks, listeners made frequent errors in reporting the presence or absence of target conjunctions. Probability modeling, derived from the visual search literature, revealed that the error rates in the primary tasks reflected the relatively infrequent failure to correctly identify pitch or timbre features, plus the far more frequent illusory conjunction of separately presented pitch and timbre features. Estimates of illusory conjunction rate ranged from 23% to 40%. Thus, a process must exist in audition that integrates separately registered features. The implications of the results for the processing of isolated auditory features, as well as auditory events defined by conjunctions of features, are discussed.
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This article is based on work supported by Grants F496209310033 and F49609310327 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to the second author. Opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect views of the granting agencies.
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Hall, M.D., Pastore, R.E., Acker, B.E. et al. Evidence for auditory feature integration with spatially distributed items. Perception & Psychophysics 62, 1243–1257 (2000). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212126
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212126