Change deafness: the inability to detect changes between two voices.

Full Abstract

A shadowing task was used to demonstrate an auditory analogue of change blindness (the failure to detect a change in a visual scene), namely change deafness. Participants repeated words varying in lexical difficulty. Halfway through the word list, either the same or a different talker presented the words to participants. At least 40% of the participants failed to detect the change in talker. More interesting is that differences in shadowing times were found as a function of change detection. Alternative possibilities to the change detection phenomenon were ruled out. The results of these experiments suggest that the allocation of attention may influence the detection of changes as well as the processing of spoken words in complex ways.

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Author information

Author/s: Vitevitch, Michael S (MS);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Indiana University Bloomington, USA. mvitevit(-atsign-)ku.edu

Grants: R03 DC 04259 (Agency:United States NIDCD) ; R03 DC004259-01A1 (Agency:United States NIDCD) ; T32 DC 00012 (Agency:United States NIDCD)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Clinical Trial; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Apr; vol 29 (issue 2) : pp 333-42

Dates: Created 2003/05/22; Completed 2003/09/09; Revised 2008/09/29;

PMID: 12760619, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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