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Listening to trees in the forest: Attentional set influences how semantic and acoustic factors interact in auditory perception

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Abstract

Studies of auditory object perception claim that semantic properties dominate acoustic properties in determining identification accuracy. Yet the direction of the semantic effect is mixed, with some studies showing an advantage for detecting incongruent sounds and others reporting a congruent sound advantage. Here we examine the role of the participant’s attentional set when identifying auditory objects in naturalistic soundscapes. We varied the acoustic and semantic properties of the sounds orthogonally in two experiments. In Experiment 1 participants tuned their attention broadly to detect any change between two successive soundscapes (e.g., two restaurant soundscapes, with and without a child coughing). In Experiment 2 they tuned attention more narrowly to a probe presented after a soundscape (e.g., a restaurant soundscape with a child coughing, followed by the coughing sound alone). In both experiments, semantic relations between the objects and backgrounds helped to disambiguate objects that blended acoustically with the background. When attending globally (Experiment 1), objects that were acoustically similar yet semantically incongruent tended to be missed (e.g., bouncing basketball on a construction site), as though camouflaged by the gist of the soundscape. When attending locally (Experiment 2), semantically congruent foil objects led to false positive reports under acoustically similar conditions (hammering sounds on a construction site), as though the gist of the soundscape contributed to their plausible inclusion. In summary, although attentional set had a strong influence on the specific kinds of errors made, both results pointed to participants using a semantically congruent high-level schema to report the sounds they heard.

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Data availability

Neither of the two experiments were preregistered. The data and stimulus material for all experiments are available via the Open Science Framework at: https://osf.io/4va8j/, https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4VA8J.

Notes

  1. The discussion in this paper does not include the identification of human speech and music, since both of these types of sounds are semantically and acoustically special and highly predictive (Agres, 2019; Large et al., 1995; Warren, 1970). Non-speech and non-musical sounds do not have dedicated processes for their acoustic features and are much less predictable than speech or music (Gygi & Shafiro, 2011.

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Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to Brian Gygi for generously providing the auditory stimulus materials. This research was funded by a Discovery Grant to JTE from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada. NB was supported by a Summer Undergraduate Student Research Assistantship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada

    Veronica Dudarev, Jamie Kai, Noor Brar & James T. Enns

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  1. Veronica Dudarev
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  2. Jamie Kai
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Correspondence to Veronica Dudarev.

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Dudarev, V., Kai, J., Brar, N. et al. Listening to trees in the forest: Attentional set influences how semantic and acoustic factors interact in auditory perception. Atten Percept Psychophys 86, 381–391 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02835-w

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