Experience-Driven Auditory Attention

In addition to conscious goals and physical salience, experience also influences auditory attention. Experience-driven attention operates at multiple levels, including an acquisition level involving the sources of attentional control and an implementation level involving attentional guidance. There are many forms of experience-driven attention, including cue–target associative learning, reward learning, and selection history. These categories represent dissociable effects that rely on a complex of different learning mechanisms. Experience can both consciously and unconsciously influence attentional guidance. In some cases, observers guide attention consciously based on explicit recognition of their experiences. Conscious recognition is not necessary for experience to affect auditory attention, however, as many forms of experience implicitly affect attentional guidance. In addition to conscious goals and stimulus salience, an observer’s prior experience also influences selective attention. Early studies demonstrated experience-driven effects on attention mainly in the visual modality, but increasing evidence shows that experience drives auditory selection as well. We review evidence for a multiple-levels framework of auditory attention, in which experience-driven attention relies on mechanisms that acquire control settings and mechanisms that guide attention towards selected stimuli. Mechanisms of acquisition include cue–target associative learning, reward learning, and sensitivity to prior selection history. Once acquired, implementation of these biases can occur either consciously or unconsciously. Future research should more fully characterize the sources of experience-driven auditory attention and investigate the neural mechanisms used to acquire and implement experience-driven auditory attention. In addition to conscious goals and stimulus salience, an observer’s prior experience also influences selective attention. Early studies demonstrated experience-driven effects on attention mainly in the visual modality, but increasing evidence shows that experience drives auditory selection as well. We review evidence for a multiple-levels framework of auditory attention, in which experience-driven attention relies on mechanisms that acquire control settings and mechanisms that guide attention towards selected stimuli. Mechanisms of acquisition include cue–target associative learning, reward learning, and sensitivity to prior selection history. Once acquired, implementation of these biases can occur either consciously or unconsciously. Future research should more fully characterize the sources of experience-driven auditory attention and investigate the neural mechanisms used to acquire and implement experience-driven auditory attention. the set of an observer’s attentional biases. Control settings arise from many sources and characterize the types of stimuli with high attentional priority. For example, an observer’s intention to listen for high-pitched sounds might result in attentional control settings prioritizing high frequencies. the process of selecting specific stimuli in the environment, often involving guiding attention from one stimulus to another. a model representing the attentional priority of stimuli at different points on an abstract map in stimulus feature space. In the visual modality, this feature space represents 2D spatial location, with the intensity of activation at any given location representing that location’s priority. Auditory priority maps operate similarly, but instead represent stimuli along spectrotemporal dimensions (and often include many other features as well). attention influenced by prior experience. Experience-driven biases can be acquired through associative learning of cue–target relationships, reward learning, and attentional selection history. axes along which stimuli can vary (e.g., frequency or color). Location as well as high-level characteristics like semantic category (e.g., ‘vowel’) are also feature dimensions. Specific points along feature dimensions (e.g., ‘600 Hz’ or ‘red’) are often termed feature values. a class of models accounting for performance asymmetries in tasks involving stimulus features that are processed at different speeds. In these models, tasks requiring the processing of one feature but not another feature (the second of which is processed more slowly than the first) should result in little influence of the second feature, as task-related processing would finish before processing of the second feature. an approach to auditory attention theory emphasizing two main components of attention: the sources of attentional control and the implementation of attentional guidance. an event-related potential component consisting of a positive deflection of electrical voltage measured approximately 200 ms following the presentation of a stimulus. In electroencephalography studies of auditory perception, the P2 has been associated with midlevel stimulus encoding and may be sensitive to task demands.