Swinging at a Cocktail Party
Ingrid S. Johnsrude, Allison Mackey, Hélène Hakyemez, Elizabeth Alexander, Heather P. Trang, Robert P. Carlyon
Psychological Science · 2013 · Volume 24 · Issue 10
Abstract
People often have to listen to someone speak in the presence of competing voices. Much is known about the acoustic cues used to overcome this challenge, but almost nothing is known about the utility of cues derived from experience with particular voices—cues that may be particularly important for older people and others with impaired hearing. Here, we use a version of the coordinate-response-measure procedure to show that people can exploit knowledge of a highly familiar voice (their spouse’s) not only to track it better in the presence of an interfering stranger’s voice, but also, crucially, to ignore it so as to comprehend a stranger’s voice more effectively. Although performance declines with increasing age when the target voice is novel, there is no decline when the target voice belongs to the listener’s spouse. This finding indicates that older listeners can exploit their familiarity with a speaker’s voice to mitigate the effects of sensory and cognitive decline.
Keywords
speech, hearing, language comprehension, aging, knowledge-based perception, auditory perceptual organization, attention, auditory perception, cognitive processes, speech perception
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