Citation

Halliday LF, Moore DR, Taylor JL, Amitay S. Atten. Percept. Psychophys. 2011; 73(5): 1329-1335.

Affiliation

MRC Institute of Hearing Research, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK, l.halliday@ucl.ac.uk.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.3758/s13414-011-0148-0

PMID

21607815

PMCID

PMC3117994

Abstract

The relative contributions of bottom-up versus top-down sensory inputs to auditory learning are not well established. In our experiment, listeners were instructed to perform either a frequency discrimination (FD) task ("FD-train group") or an intensity discrimination (ID) task ("ID-train group") during training on a set of physically identical tones that were impossible to discriminate consistently above chance, allowing us to vary top-down attention whilst keeping bottom-up inputs fixed. A third, control group did not receive any training. Only the FD-train group improved on a FD probe following training, whereas all groups improved on ID following training. However, only the ID-train group also showed changes in performance accuracy as a function of interval with training on the ID task. These findings suggest that top-down, dimension-specific attention can direct auditory learning, even when this learning is not reflected in conventional performance measures of threshold change.

Language: en