The Role Of Attention In The Formation Of Auditory Streaming

Auditory streaming is one of the important research topics in cognitive psychology. A number of studies have been done on whether auditory streaming requires attention, but they have not reached a concesus yet. Currently there exist two major opposite hypotheses: the build-up of auditory streaming requires attention, and attention has no influence on auditory streaming. In order to further explore the role of attention in the formation of auditory streaming, the present study conducted two experiments wherein the subject auditory stream judgment paradigm was used to examine the influence of auditory or visual competing tasks with multiple load levels on auditory streaming. The main findings of the study are as follows:(1) Attention and processing time are required in the formation of auditory streaming in most cases. However, when the frequency difference of two sound components is large enough, the auditory streaming can be formed directly based on basic neurons which respond to different frequency without the requirement of attention.(2) The requirement of attention in the formation of auditory streaming is not an "all-or-none" issue. With the increase of available attentional resources, it is easier to form auditory streaming. The smaller the frequency differences between two components, the more attentional resources are required.(3) The competing auditory task (e. g. noise judgment) will take up the attention resource which auditory streaming requires. But the visual task (e. g. MOT) might use fewer attentional resources. Therefore, it is possible that auditory modality and visual modality have their own independant attention system.