CONSTRAINTS ON THE SELECTION OF AUDITORY INFORMATION

Four experiments were conducted to determine whether or not (a) select ion of auditory information may be guided separately by location and f requency channels and (b) auditory attention is allocated to spatial l ocations and frequency regions or to auditory objects (i.e., streams). In Experiment 1, listeners were to categorize tones by location or fr equency. In Experiments 2A and 2B, target identification was examined as a function of its similarity to a precue. In Experiment 3, the rime required to detect a target embedded within a sequence of distractor tones was examined. In all experiments, performance depended on both l ocation and frequency information even if I of these features was comp letely irrelevant with respect to the task. Results indicate that sele ction of auditory information is accomplished by an attentional templa te normally defined by both location and frequency parameters.