Journal
DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 51, Issue 3, Pages 353-369Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/a0038570
Keywords
auditory masking; selective attention; internal noise; pure tone detection; reverse correlation
Categories
Funding
- Medical Research Council, U.K. [U135097130]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were influenced by (i.e., gave weight to) each spectral region of the stimulus. Psychometric fits were also used to estimate levels of internal noise and bias. Levels of masking were found to decrease with age, becoming adult-like by 9-11 years. This change was explained by improvements in selective attention alone, with older listeners better able to ignore noise similar in frequency to the target. Consistent with this, age-related differences in masking were abolished when the noise was made more distant in frequency to the target. This work offers novel evidence that improvements in selective attention are critical for the normal development of auditory judgments.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available