When Less is Heard than Meets the Ear: Change Deafness in a Telephone Conversation

Abstract

During a conversation, we hear the sound of the talker as well as the intended message. Traditional models of speech perception posit that acoustic details of a talker's voice are not encoded with the message whereas more recent models propose that talker identity is automatically encoded. When shadowing speech, listeners often fail to detect a change in talker identity. The present study was designed to investigate whether talker changes would be detected when listeners are actively engaged in a normal conversation, and visual information about the speaker is absent. Participants were called on the phone, and during the conversation the experimenter was surreptitiously replaced by another talker. Participants rarely noticed the change. However, when explicitly monitoring for a change, detection increased. Voice memory tests suggested that participants remembered only coarse information about both voices, rather than fine details. This suggests that although listeners are capable of change detection, voice information is not continuously monitored at a fine-grain level of acoustic representation during natural conversation and is not automatically encoded. Conversational expectations may shape the way we direct attention to voice characteristics and perceive differences in voice.

Orienting attention to sound object representations attenuates change deafness.

“…Indeed, evidence from behavioral studies suggests that participants often failed to notice changes in a visual (Levin, Simons, Angelone, & Chabris, 2002;Sinnett, Costa, & Soto-Faraco, 2006;Triesch. Ballard, Hayhoe, & Sullivan, 2003) or auditory scene (Fenn et al, 2011;Sinnett et al, 2006;Vitevitch, 2003) when the change was unexpected-even when the objects were to be attended (Caplovitz, Fendrich. & Hughes, 2008).…”

Exploring the relationships between International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) constructs of Impairment, Activity Limitation and Participation Restriction in people with osteoarthritis prior to joint replacement

“…P to A, A to I and P to I) when follow-up post-surgical data is available for these patients. However even with these investigations of predictions over time, these studies cannot test whether the relationships are truly causal and this will require experimental studies such as those conducted by Fisher & Johnston (1996) [45]. In this study we only explored I, A and P and not the contextual factors.…”

Segregating the Neural Correlates of Physical and Perceived Change in Auditory Input using the Change Deafness Effect

“…Remarkably, previous studies on visual change detection have demonstrated that even pronounced changes within a complex visual scene can remain unnoticed if they occur after a short interruption of the visual presentation (Simons & Rensink, 2005;Rensink, 2002). Recently, several psychophysical experiments provided evidence for the existence of a similar effect in the auditory modality (Backer & Alain, 2012;Fenn et al, 2011;Vitevitch & Donoso, 2011;Gregg & Samuel, 2008Eramudugolla, McAnally, Martin, Irvine, & Mattingley, 2008;Pavani & Turatto, 2008;Eramudugolla, Irvine, McAnally, Martin, & Mattingley, 2005;Vitevitch, 2003). In a similar manner to visual change blindness, this change deafness emerges when listeners have to monitor demanding auditory scenes consisting of several streams (Gregg & Samuel, 2008Eramudugolla et al, 2005Eramudugolla et al, , 2008Pavani & Turatto, 2008) or when concentrating on a specific aspect of the auditory input (Fenn et al, 2011;Vitevitch, 2003).…”