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Inattentional deafness in music

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Abstract

While inattentional blindness is a modern classic in attention and perception research, analogous phenomena of inattentional deafness have been widely neglected. We here present the first investigation of inattentional deafness in and with music under controlled experimental conditions. Inattentional deafness in music is defined as the inability to consciously perceive an unexpected musical stimulus when attention is focused on a certain facet of the piece. Participants listened to a modification of the first 1′50″ of Richard Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra; while the control group just listened, the experimental group had to count the number of timpani beats. An e-guitar solo served as the unexpected event. In Study 1, experimental data from n = 115 participants were analyzed. Non-musicians were compared with musicians to investigate the impact of expertise. In Study 2 (n = 47), the scope of the inattentional deafness effect was investigated with a more salient unexpected stimulus. Results demonstrate an inattentional deafness effect under dynamic musical conditions. Quite unexpectedly, the effect was structurally equivalent even for musicians. Our findings clearly show that sustained inattentional deafness exists in the musical realm, in close correspondence to inattentional blindness with dynamic visual stimuli.

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Notes

  1. Due to cells with zero frequencies, we repeated the model selection procedure with a constant of 1 added either to all cells or to all zero frequency cells. Both analyses resulted in the same final model with significant main effects and no interactions, as well as the same rank order of B-weights for the main effects.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Primus Sitter for his pro bono help with stimulus design, to Sabine Strauß for her support with stimulus selection, and to Judith Glück and Rainer Alexandrowicz for numerous helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. A preliminary report on this work has been published in the Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (Koreimann, Strauß, & Vitouch, 2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cognitive Psychology Unit (CPU), Department of Psychology, University of Klagenfurt, Universitätsstraße 65-67, 9020, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Sabrina Koreimann, Bartosz Gula & Oliver Vitouch

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  1. Sabrina Koreimann
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  2. Bartosz Gula
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  3. Oliver Vitouch
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Correspondence to Bartosz Gula.

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Koreimann, S., Gula, B. & Vitouch, O. Inattentional deafness in music. Psychological Research 78, 304–312 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0552-x

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