Responding to One of Two Simultaneous Messages

Abstract

Twenty operators were given a task which required answering one of two simultaneous voice messages. The task was performed under a variety of conditions produced by combinations of four experimental “aid” variables: horizontal spatial separation of the sound sources, aural shaping filters which made the tone quality different in each channel, visual cues which indicated the channel about to call the operator, and facilities to “pull down” a desired message from the initial source into a headphone or a loudspeaker near the operator's ear. It was found that the use of horizontal separation and/or the filtered messages greatly improved the operator's performance. Visual cues had no apparent effect on ability to answer the message except when used with pull down facilities. The pull down facilities aided the operator to some extent. Some speculations are advanced about the nature of recognizing and attending to a message in the presence of another message.

Summer Research Program - 1998 Graduate Student Research Program Volume 7 Armstrong Laboratory

“…Actual spatial separation in the free-field appears to provide even greater improvement in speech intelligibility. For example, Spieth, Curtis, and Webster (1954) found that speech intelligibility improved as the spatial separation between two simultaneous speech phrases increased. The fact that sounds in the real world occur external to the listener, and occupy actual locations in space appears to help a listener segregate multiple simultaneous sounds.…”

“…While most current communications systems in complex environments employ only monaural presentation of auditory stimuli (i.e., presentation over a single earphone), the benefits of binaural hearing to communication effectiveness has long been known (Licklider, 1948;Hirsh, 1950;Cherry, 1953;Cherry and Taylor, 1954;Spieth, Curtis, and Webster, 1954;Webster and Thompson, 1957). For instance, researchers have found improvements for speech intelligibility in noise and for speech intelligibility in the presence of competing speech when the multiple speech phrases arrive at different ears (Hirsh, 1950;Cherry, 1953).…”

Varieties of musical experience

“…We can perhaps operationalize conscious experience as the content of awareness or attention. Attention is a selective processing system of limited capacity (Cherry, 1953;Spieth, Curtis, & Webster, 1954). Attention seems to be necessary for the formation of some perceptual groupings, including stream formation (Carlyon, Cusack, Foxton, & Robertson, 2001) and time varying events (Large & Jones, 1999).…”

Presenting multiple auditory signals using multiple sound cards in Visual Basic 6.0

“…In particular, one critical limitation in auditory research has been the difficulty associated with presenting multiple auditory stimuli, such as multiple voices, at the same time from different spatial locations, as when trying to study the cocktail party problem. To date, research concerning this phenomenon has utilized, at most, two auditory signals (Cherry, 1953(Cherry, , 1954Nelson, Bolia, Ericson, & McKinley, 1998;Spieth, Curtis, & Webster, 1954;Wood & Cowan, 1995a, 1995bYost, 1997). To the best of our knowledge, none of the issues addressed in these experiments has been readdressed with more than two voices, with the exception of the studies reported by Yost. Lavie and colleagues (Lavie & Fox, 2000;Lavie & Tsal, 1994) found that in the visual system, as the perceptual load of a task increased, participants increasingly selectively attended only to relevant target stimuli and ignored irrelevant distractor stimuli.…”