Selectively attending to auditory objects

The ability to maintain a conversation with one person while at a noisy coc ktail party has often been used to illustrate a general characteristic of a uditory selective attention, namely that perceivers' attention is usually d irected to a particular set of sounds and not to others. Part of the cockta il party problem involves parsing co-occurring speech sounds and simultaneo usly integrating these various speech tokens into meaningful units ("audito ry scene analysis"). Here, we review auditory perception and selective atte ntion studies in an attempt to determine the role of perceptual organizatio n in selective attention. Results from several behavioral and electrophysio logical studies indicate that the ability to focus attention selectively on a particular sound source depends on a preliminary analysis that partition s the auditory input into distinct perceptual objects. Most findings can be accounted for by an object-based hypothesis in which auditory attention is allocated to perceptual objects derived from the auditory scene according to perceptual grouping principles.