Most of us are able to listen to things we want, people we want and block out the noise we don’t, though there is a barrage of auditory stimuli hitting our sensors. This is what is called the cocktail party effect. However, the hearing impaired can’t do this and struggle to keep pace with people who have normal hearing abilities. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, a Boston University professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, and a few graduate students have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) which deals with the complex acoustic scene and studies how we are able to switch attention spatially. The listener’s ability to recall a sequence of spoken digits was studied by using five loudspeakers and sending out words from them, in order to study the hearing perception of the listener. The results show that when all the words or sounds come out of the same loud speaker, a listener can hear well. This may help us to understand why we find it difficult to concentrate in a noisy environment.
Via ScienceDaily
