We live in complex environments in which simultaneous visual and auditory stimuli compete for our attention. If we want to feel safe in such environments, it is crucial to attend to suddenly appearing and disappearing sound streams, that is – to be able to detect sudden sound changes all around us.

Here, we present a novel experimental setup for investigating auditory change detection with normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners. Our setup uses a combination of everyday environmental sounds (e.g. Eramudugolla et al., 2005), adjusted for use with different hearing aid processing schemes (e.g. Brungart et al., 2014).

As a first step of our exploration into the influence of hearing aid processing on the change detection ability, we present the experimental setup and first results with 20 normal hearing, unaided listeners.

References:

• Brungart, D. S., Cohen, J., Cord, M., Zion, D., & Kalluri, S. (2014). Assessment of auditory spatial awareness in complex listening environments. J Acoust Soc Am, 136(4), 1808-1820. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4893932
• Eramudugolla, R., Irvine, D. R., McAnally, K. I., Martin, R. L., & Mattingley, J. B. (2005). Directed attention eliminates 'change deafness' in complex auditory scenes. Curr Biol, 15(12), 1108-1113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2005.05.051