Sophie Nolden

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main · Institute of Psychology

Auditory selective attention is a valuable tool to orient oneself in highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers and background noises. Among others, it includes processes of intentional attention control in spatial situations and suppression of irrelevant incoming information. This contribution provides an overv...

The characterization of the relationship between predictions and one-shot episodic encoding poses an important challenge for memory research. On the one hand, events that are compatible with our previous knowledge are thought to be remembered better than incompatible ones. On the other hand, unexpected situations, by virtue of their novelty, are kn...

During auditory development, children are confronted with the challenge of orienting themselves in complex acoustic situations. For this, they need to focus on a relevant target sound while ignoring simultaneous distracting sounds in a multi-layered acoustic environment, which is known as auditory selective attention. In everyday communication situ...

We used a variant of cued auditory task switching to investigate task preparation and its relation to response-set overlap. Previous studies found increased interference with overlapping response sets across tasks relative to non-overlapping motor response sets. In the present experiments, participants classified either pitch or loudness of a simpl...

Generating predictions about environmental regularities, relying on these predictions, and updating these predictions when there is a violation from incoming sensory evidence are considered crucial functions of our cognitive system for being adaptive in the future. The violation of a prediction can result in a prediction error (PE) which affects su...

Two event-related brain potential (ERP) components elicited during feedback processing are the frontocentral feedback-related negativity (FRN), followed by the posterior P300. According to the Error-Related Reinforcement Learning Theory (Holroyd & Coles, 2002), the FRN amplitude is largest when the outcome is negative and unexpected. Complementing...

We developed a new variant of auditory task-switching in order to systematically investigate shifting and cognitive control in auditory task-switching and their relation to motor response overlap in a comprehensive way. In two experiments, participants classified either pitch or loudness of a simple tone as either low or high, hence, both tasks wer...

Children's development and education take place in educational buildings with highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers, many surrounding distracting sounds, and general background noises. Auditory selective attention, therefore, is a valuable tool to orient oneself, to focus on specific sound sources, and to e...

The characterization of the relationship between predictions and one-shot episodic encoding poses an important challenge for memory research. On the one hand, events that are compatible with our previous knowledge are thought to be remembered better than incompatible ones. On the other hand, unexpected situations, by virtue of their surprise, are k...

In the context of classrooms, children are mostly exposed to a significant amount of noise on a daily basis. Noise effects are typically discussed regarding aural effects (e.g., hearing impairments) but can also be expressed in a psychological (e.g., auditory cognition) and physiological manner (e.g., stress-related bodily reactions). Until now, th...

From age 5 to 7, there are remarkable improvements in children’s cognitive abilities (“5–7 shift”). In many countries, including Germany, formal schooling begins in this age range. It is, thus, unclear to what extent exposure to formal schooling contributes to the “5–7 shift.” In this longitudinal study, we investigated if schooling acts as a catal...

We studied negative priming (NP) in auditory attention switching. In a cued variant of dichotic listening, two spoken number words were presented, one to each ear, one spoken by a female, and one spoken by a male voice. A visual cue indicated whether the male or female voice was the target. A numerical magnitude judgement of the target number was r...

A remarkable part of children's development and education happens in educational institutions. Acoustic environments in these institutions are usually highly complex and noisy, hence it is demanding to identify relevant target speakers and to ignore irrelevant sounds. Previous research has analyzed auditory selective attention in adults, both in di...

In task switching studies, response repetition effects are typically obtained: When the task repeats, response repetitions are faster than response switches (response repetition benefit), but when the task switches, the opposite is found (response repetition cost). Previously, it was found that spatial response distance [RD] affected the response r...

A considerable part of children’s development and education takes place in educational buildings like preschools and primary schools. There, children are confronted with highly complex acoustic scenes, including target speakers with many surrounding distracting sounds. Auditory selective attention enables to identify the relevant target speaker and...

We developed an experimental paradigm to test cognitive flexibility of auditory attention and susceptibility to noise in children (6-10 years old). The task was inspired by previous work with young and older adults. Participants focused on one of two binaurally presented voices in order to perform a two-choice classification task. Target and distra...

In a two-component switching paradigm, in which participants switched between two auditory attention selection criteria (attention component: left vs. right ear) and two judgements (judgement component: number vs. letter judgement), we found high judgement switch costs in attention criterion repetitions, but low costs in attention criterion switche...

The goal of the present study was to investigate preparatory mechanisms of auditory selective attention. In two experiments, participants performed a classification task on one of two dichotically presented spoken number words, one spoken by a female, one spoken by a male. A cue indicated which gender participants had to attend to in the upcoming t...

In the present study, participants performed highly comparable task-switching and dual-task paradigms, and the paradigm-specific performance costs were analysed in the context of the commonly postulated core components of cognitive control (i.e., working memory updating, inhibition, and shifting). In the task-switching paradigm, we found switch cos...

We investigated how emotional sounds are processed by musicians and non-musicians. Expertise through musical training can shape the way emotional music is processed. However, emotional sounds can arise from other sound sources, too, such as vocal expressions like laughter or cries. Musical expertise can also influence the way these emotional sounds...

To examine whether hierarchical higher level task representations comprising the task sets of Task 1 (T1) and Task 2 (T2) are activated within each trial in dual-task situations, we combined the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm with the task-pair switching logic (Hirsch et al. 2017). In Experiment 1, in which subjects switched between...

An auditory attention-switching paradigm was combined with a judgment-switching paradigm to examine the interaction of a varying auditory attention component and a varying judgment component. Participants heard two dichotically presented stimuli-one spoken by a female speaker and one spoken by a male speaker. In each trial, the stimuli were a spoke...

In an auditory attention-switching paradigm, participants heard two simultaneously spoken number-words, each presented to one ear, and decided if the target number was smaller or larger than five by pressing a left or right key. An instructional cue in each trial indicated which feature had to be used to identify the target-number (e.g. female voic...

The current study focuses on auditory task switching, more precisely on switching attention between different temporal patterns of the same auditory stimulus. Tone sequences consisting of nine different pitch tones were presented aurally. Three repetitive short 3-tone patterns (local focus) were combined to a long pattern (global focus), and each c...

In the present study, we combined the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm with a novel task-pair switching logic which enabled us to isolate performance costs occurring at the global level of task-pairs. In Experiment 1, in which we used conceptually overlapping responses for Task 1 (T1) and Task 2 (T2), we generated 3 task-pairs by comb...

This chapter reviews brain activity related to the retention of basic sensory features in auditory short-term memory. An electrophysiological correlate of the retention of tones, the sustained anterior negativity, has been isolated in a series of recent experiments, and has contributed to a better understanding of fundamental mechanisms underlying...

The maintenance of information in auditory short-term memory (ASTM) is accompanied by a sustained anterior negativity (SAN) in the event-related potential measured during the retention interval of simple auditory memory tasks. Previous work on ASTM showed that the amplitude of the SAN increased in negativity as the number of maintained items increa...

Humans appear to act in response to environmental demands or to pursue self-chosen goals. In the laboratory, these situations are often investigated with forced- and free-choice tasks: in forced-choice tasks, a stimulus determines the one correct response, while in free-choice tasks the participants choose between response alternatives. We compared...

We examined the electrophysiological correlates of retention in auditory short-term memory (ASTM) for sequences of one, two, or three tones differing in timbre but having the same pitch. We focused on event-related potentials (ERPs) during the retention interval and revealed a sustained fronto-central ERP component (most likely a Sustained Anterior...

Intentional binding describes the phenomenon that actions and their effects are perceived to be temporally approximated. We introduced a new method of duration estimation to the research field, the method of constant stimuli. Participants freely chose to press one of two keys or experienced passive key presses. After an interval of 250 ms or 600 ms...

We studied the neuronal mechanisms that implement acoustic short-term memory (ASTM) for pitch using event-related potentials (ERP). Experiment 1 isolated an ERP component, the sustained anterior negativity (SAN), that increased in amplitude with increasing memory load in ASTM using stimuli with equal duration at all memory loads. The SAN load effec...