PROCEEDINGS of the23rd International Congress on Acoustics
9 to 13 September 2019 in Aachen, Germany

Attentional mechanisms in static and dynamic
cocktail-party listening
Hartmut MEISTER1; Fabian WENZEL1; Axel GEHLEN1, Martin WALGER212

Jean Uhrmacher Institute, University of Cologne, Germany

Clinic of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, University of Cologne, Germany

ABSTRACT
Verbal communication often takes place in situations with several simultaneous speakers. This was coined by
the term “cocktail-party problem” (1). These situations pose high demands on both the auditory system aswell as cognitive capacity of the listener. Particularly attentional mechanisms appear to be crucial for
cocktail-party listening: In a “static” situation the aim is to focus attention on one talker and to ignore thecompeting background (2). However, dividing and switching attention also play a role since the talker ofinterest may change dynamically from time to time in an unpredictable manner (3, 4, 5).
Since both hearing and cognition typically decline with age (6) it is important to shed more light on
attentional mechanisms associated with cocktail-party listening. Therefore, we investigated performance ofyoung and older listeners in a static and a dynamic three-talker paradigm. Target sentences indicated by aparticular call-sign were presented with (static situation) and without (dynamic situation) a priori knowledge
about the talker of interest. Different types and probabilities of switching were considered in the dynamicsituation.
In the static situation all listeners performed at a very high level. Hence, robust cues for auditory streaming –such as voice and location of the talker - were given in the multitalker paradigm. In the dynamic condition
performance dropped significantly, even when target talker switches occurred only rarely. However, the twoage groups performed relatively similarly, at least when older participants with good hearing and good
cognitive abilities were taken into account.
The presentation disentangles different attentional mechanisms, such as focused attention in the staticsituation and dividing and switching attention in the dynamic situation.
Keywords: Cocktail-Party, speech recognition, attention, aging

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (ME 2751/3-1)

REFERENCES
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617710000706

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