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Student Class

2025

Student Affiliation

Senior Honors Thesis

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6015-1123

First Advisor

Viola Stormer

First Advisor Department

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Description

Extensive evidence suggests that previous experience guides visuospatial attention. For instance, studies of location probability learning demonstrate that repeatedly finding a search target in a particular region of the visual field produces attentional biases for that region (Jiang et al., 2013; Addleman, 2019). Similarly, Addleman (2019) demonstrated a comparable auditory effect whereby repeated location of an auditory target induced attentional preference for the specific region. However, there have been fewer explorations of whether the repeated selection of auditory non-spatial features, such as pitch, influences auditory selective attention. Can participants incidentally learn the probability structure of simple auditory features such as pitch, and use this experience to more effectively select more probable target sounds?

To investigate this question, we developed an auditory search paradigm where participants heard two sounds presented to both ears simultaneously and were tasked to report the location (left vs. right) of a target sound, which contains a brief gap. Unbeknownst to the participants, targets were disproportionately more likely to appear in one pitch (either low, medium, or high, counterbalanced across participants) than the other two. In a subsequent extinction phase, targets were equally likely to occur in all three pitches. We tested whether participants would be faster for frequent versus infrequent target sounds across both experimental phases. Our results showed that participants were faster at detecting that target sound that was associated with the frequent pitch, and this learning persisted, at least to some extent, into the extinction phase. However, we also observed that the magnitude of this probability learning was stimulus-dependent, such that higher pitched sounds exhibited the strongest learning benefit. This work suggests a critical role for stimulus salience in long-term probability learning, as stimulus salience may modulate the strength of probability learning, at least in auditory selective attention. Broadly, this study generalizes effects of probability learning in the visual domain to feature-based attention in the auditory domain, providing a first stepping stone to understanding how experience shapes selective attention across sensory domains.

Publication Date

Spring 5-12-2025

Keywords

attention, learning, experience

Pitch probability learning in auditory selective attention

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