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Increase in response time (ms) with singleton SC (left, experiment 2) and modulation depth (right, experiment 3). Error bars represent the standard errors across participants in each condition compared to the no-singleton condition. Significances between conditions are displayed on the horizontal braces. *: p < .05, **: p < .01, ***: p < .001.
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Attention allows the listener to select relevant information from their environment, and disregard what is irrelevant. However, irrelevant stimuli sometimes manage to capture it and stand out from a scene because of bottom-up processes driven by salient stimuli. This attentional capture effect was observed using an implicit approach based on the ad...
Citations
... This phenomenon is known as involuntary attentional capture. Salience is the property of a stimulus that can attract attention (a bottom-up component of attention) (Treue, 2003;Bouvier et al., 2023) Thus, the characteristics of a message that distinguish it from the general information flow are more likely to attract attention during exposure. For example, utilising visual elements, such as bright colours, images and warning signs, increases message impact because these elements are very noticeable to the audience and can involuntarily attract attention (Sutton et al., 2024). ...
The article presents the results of a theoretical analysis on the topic of media-psychological aspects of the perception of environmental risks and the presentation of the author's media psychological model of the impact of media messages on the perception of environmental risks. The presented model examines the processes and stages involved in the initial encounter with environmental risk messages in the media and the further outcomes of their processing which can manifest in information-seeking behaviour. According to the presented model, changes in risk perception are considered a series of stages initiated by attention to information and can continue when information-seeking behaviour is triggered. The main models relied on by the author of this study are the Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing to describe media message processing and the Risk Information Search and Processing Model to describe aspects of information-seeking behaviour. Several additional communication models dedicated to the consideration of information behaviour and processing of media messages were also used to describe the processes of mass media influence on the perception of environmental risks. Thus, dual models of information processing and persuasive communication are also considered, including the Heuristic-Systematic Model and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, as well as additional theories examining information-seeking behaviour: the Theory of Motivated Information Management and the Planned Risk Information Seeking Model
... has been shown to demand attention (Bouvier et al., 2023), attention-related experiences that are linked to the urge to move, such as perceived catchiness or immersion (Duman et al., 2024), might mediate the direct effect of brightness. Alternatively, the direct effects might be representative of music structure's influence on the acoustic descriptors. ...
This study investigates how polyphonic timbre, an important factor in music listening, influences the groove experience, one of the most important reactions to music. We selected six short popular music bass and drum patterns from the genres funk, pop, and rock and rendered them with three different genre-typical timbres (funk, pop, rock) each (18 stimuli). In an online listening experiment (N = 131), participants rated their experienced urge to move, pleasure, energetic arousal, time-related interest, and inner representation of temporal regularity in response to these stimuli. We found that the genre-typical timbres had only tiny effects on the experienced urge to move, which moreover varied by pattern. In contrast, acoustical measurements of two aspects of timbre proved to be better predictors for the urge to move (R2m = 0.132). An analysis with the psychological model of groove revealed that polyphonic timbre influences the urge to move directly, and via energetic arousal and time-related interest but not via pleasure.
... Our results provide additional empirical support to the idea that acoustic saliency is not only a matter of specific acoustic features (e.g., rugosity, see Arnal et al., 2019; or shorter inter-onset intervals, see Suied et al., 2010), but also a matter of contextual information (see Kothini & Elhilali, 2023 for a recent discussion)-since local alterations in loudness, both through crescendos and decrescendos, were enough to attract musicians' attention. While this idea has already been tested through highly controlled psychoacoustic tasks, in which participants are presented with short artificial sequences of sounds (see, e.g., Bouvier et al., 2023), our study extends the validity of these results to an interactional context in which participants rely on a variety of instrumental sounds that are on a far greater level of acoustic complexity. ...
While empirical studies on joint music-making have shed light on many aspects of ensemble performance in the past few decades, the role of auditory attention in such a context has remained strikingly understudied. We draw here on a self-annotation methodology to investigate musicians’ listening behaviors in freely improvised performances. Six trios of professional musicians were asked to freely improvise in a recording studio, hearing each other only through headphones. While they were playing, the loudness of each musician as sent to the other two musicians’ headphones was covertly increased/decreased during random periods of time in order to enhance its relative saliency within the musical scene. Immediately after each improvisation, musicians were asked to listen to the improvisation that they had just performed and to continuously indicate, using a specific application, where their listening focus was as they were performing. The results demonstrated that during periods of loudness manipulation, musicians’ attention was significantly drawn to the musician who had been made more salient. Two follow-up studies then investigated the extent to which joint auditory attention correlated with perceived togetherness, as well as whether improvisers’ auditory attention during the performance aligned with that of external listeners attending to the recording of the performance. Taken together, our results suggest that, beyond the effects of saliency, musicians also tend to strategically adapt their listening behavior to the specificities of the interactional context and that musicians’ collective listening behaviors have an impact on the performance, both at an acoustic level and at a perceptual level. By relying on attentional patterns that dynamically emerged from complex, ecological musical interactions, our studies provide a first attempt at assessing the effects of auditory attention on coordination and contribute to establishing sonic interactions as a promising setting for the study of the effects of joint attention.
... While this effect was most evident in energy features, several other spectral and temporal modulation features showed similar trends. Features such as pitch, brightness, and roughness were observed to affect salience directly (Arnal et al., 2019;Bouvier et al., 2023), and the lower changes in these features for mismatched events suggest contribution from other factors. Additionally, none of the acoustic features considered showed significant differences between fwd-match and bwd-match events. ...
Auditory salience is a fundamental property of a sound that allows it to grab a listener's attention regardless of their attentional state or behavioral goals. While previous research has shed light on acoustic factors influencing auditory salience, the semantic dimensions of this phenomenon have remained relatively unexplored owing both to the complexity of measuring salience in audition as well as limited focus on complex natural scenes. In this study, we examine the relationship between acoustic, contextual, and semantic attributes and their impact on the auditory salience of natural audio scenes using a dichotic listening paradigm. The experiments present acoustic scenes in forward and backward directions; the latter allows to diminish semantic effects, providing a counterpoint to the effects observed in forward scenes. The behavioral data collected from a crowd-sourced platform reveal a striking convergence in temporal salience maps for certain sound events, while marked disparities emerge in others. Our main hypothesis posits that differences in the perceptual salience of events are predominantly driven by semantic and contextual cues, particularly evident in those cases displaying substantial disparities between forward and backward presentations. Conversely, events exhibiting a high degree of alignment can largely be attributed to low-level acoustic attributes. To evaluate this hypothesis, we employ analytical techniques that combine rich low-level mappings from acoustic profiles with high-level embeddings extracted from a deep neural network. This integrated approach captures both acoustic and semantic attributes of acoustic scenes along with their temporal trajectories. The results demonstrate that perceptual salience is a careful interplay between low-level and high-level attributes that shapes which moments stand out in a natural soundscape. Furthermore, our findings underscore the important role of longer-term context as a critical component of auditory salience, enabling us to discern and adapt to temporal regularities within an acoustic scene. The experimental and model-based validation of semantic factors of salience paves the way for a complete understanding of auditory salience. Ultimately, the empirical and computational analyses have implications for developing large-scale models for auditory salience and audio analytics.
This chapter describes a conceptual model of speech quality perception for listening-only test scenarios, specifying internal processes and representations at different processing stages (sensory, perceptual, and response-related). Components of the event-related brain potential (ERP) are linked to specific internal processes as psychophysiological indicators. The final paragraph lists research questions that are to be addressed in three studies (Chaps. 5–7).
Occupational noise exposure is a widespread concern, impacting millions of workers. The present research focuses on the audibility of acoustic alarms to ensure worker safety while minimizing exposure to unnecessarily high alarm levels. It introduces a laboratory experiment carried on normal-hearing participants to assess the perceived audibility of acoustic alarms in various workplace noise conditions. The experiment aimed to enhance comprehension of the audibility of acoustic alarms at supra-threshold levels, sought to facilitate the formulation of improved guidelines for alarm design. The results reveal the inappropriateness of the most commonly employed alarm level setting criterion of the ISO 7731 international standard, leading to excessive alarm levels in highly noisy work environments. Based on our data, we propose a revised value for this criterion. In addition, an acoustical analysis of the sounds used in the experiment shows that alarms that are more salient are perceived as more audible, thereby providing leads for alarm design. The study also introduces an innovative technique using a convolutional neural network model to predict the audibility of alarms in noise. Moving beyond generic arbitrary criteria, this data-driven approach leverages knowledge from perceptually annotated examples sourced from our contributed dataset. Evaluation on the experimental data and further analysis of the model outputs demonstrate solid alignment of the model predictions with human perception.
