Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Beyond masking release: Differences in voice pitch and spatial location freeing up cognitive resources

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Rebekah Adams¹ (rebekah.adams@mail.mcgill.ca), Mickael Deroche¹; ¹Concordia University

The ability of the human brain to extract a voice from a background of competing speakers is a complex process that we struggle to understand. However, people use distinctions in voice pitch (harmonic cues) and spatial location (binaural cues) between two speakers to separate them perceptually. While the mechanisms behind this perceptual separation are unclear, it effectively makes the background quieter, resulting in better speech recognition. We know that quieter backgrounds are generally favourable to attentional and memory systems because they free up cognitive resources previously spent decoding speech. Therefore, we hypothesize that harmonic and binaural cues have benefits beyond their known contribution to auditory masking release to higher-level cognitive processes, namely short-term memory. To test this, fifty 10-word lists were presented to normally hearing adult participants in their first language in the presence of a non-linguistic masker. Experiment 1 examines the use of a pitch cue where words either share the same fundamental frequency (F0) or have different F0 by 3-semitones from the masking tone. Experiment 2 examines the use of a spatial cue where words come from either the same location or differ by 120 degrees from the location of the masking noise. The target and masker are presented at 5 different target-to-masker ratios (TMRs) to capture the whole psychometric function. Preliminary data suggests that the benefits of harmonic and binaural cues transfer to the recall task only to a small degree, which cannot simply be explained by the increases in intelligibility.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory