Connecting cues to signals in auditory attention Free

Among his many fields of study, Bert Scharf played a major role in our understanding the role of auditory attention, especially at the level of basic psychophysics. Of special importance to this talk is the profound influence that he had on research in our lab (myself, Bert Schlauch, Joyce Tang, Kourosh Saberi, and Poppy Crum) through his work on signal uncertainty in masking and its alleviation by specific informational cues. Scharf’s resurrection of the probe-signal method led us to examine the effects of uncertainty on both the means and variances of effective bandwidths used by listeners in a detection task. Also shown will be cases where we used different kinds of cues to study detection at various levels of processing including judgments based on: specific spectral components, complex pitches derived from sets of harmonics and locations in frequency reliant on mentally tracking an FM stimulus through a period of occlusion.