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Within‐Channel Selection and Event‐Related Potentials During Selective Auditory Attention
Author(s) -
Okita Tsunetaka
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1989.tb03143.x
Subject(s) - vowel , selection (genetic algorithm) , psychology , tone (literature) , audiology , channel (broadcasting) , selective attention , speech recognition , communication , cognitive psychology , cognition , neuroscience , linguistics , computer science , telecommunications , artificial intelligence , medicine , philosophy
Event‐related potentials were recorded from subjects who listened selectively to stimuli in one of two input channels (ears). The stimuli were random sequences of five vowels and a tone pip. In separate experimental runs, the difficulty of within‐channel selection was manipulated by designating either tone (T), one vowel (1V), or two vowels (2V) as targets. An attention‐related negativity (Nd) was observed for attended nontarget vowels irrespective of the target difficulty, but the early, centrally maximal phase of Nd was substantial only for the one‐vowel and two‐vowel conditions. The Nd between its early and late peaks was significantly larger for the two‐vowel condition than for the one‐vowel and tone conditions. The 2V minus 1V difference in Nd had a closely similar distribution to the early Nd. These target difficulty effects were interpreted as suggesting that the early Nd recorded in two‐selection tasks can be related to a within‐channel selection process as well as a between‐channel selection process. The more anteriorly distributed, later phase of Nd was suggested to be rather insensitive to the difficulty of the within‐channel selection. The nature of the within‐channel selection underlying the early Nd was discussed in relation to controlled memory search operations.