Selective auditory attention, or selective hearing, is a process of the auditory system where an individual selects or focuses on certain stimuli for auditory information processing while other stimuli are disregarded. This selection is very important as the processing and memory capabilities for humans have a limited capacity. When people use selective hearing, noise from the surrounding environment is heard by the auditory system but only certain parts of the auditory information are chosen to be processed by the brain. Most often, auditory attention is directed at things people are most interested in hearing. Selective hearing is not a physiological disorder but rather it is the capability of most humans to block out sounds and noise. It is the notion of ignoring certain things in the surrounding environment.
Bottleneck effect In an article by Krans, Isbell, Giuliano, and Neville (2013), selective auditory attention can be seen through the process of the bottleneck effect, a process of the brain that inhibits processing of multiple stimuli. For example, a student is focused on a teacher giving a lesson and ignoring the sounds of classmates in a rowdy classroom. As a result, the information given from the teacher is stored and encoded in the student's long-term memory and the stimuli from the rowdy classroom is completely ignored as if it were not present in the first place. A brain simply cannot, for a sustained period, collect all sensory information that is occurring in a chaotic real-world environment, so only the most relevant and important information is thoroughly processed by the brain.
History Early researches on selective auditory attention can be traced back to 1953, when Colin Cherry introduced the "cocktail party problem". At the time, air traffic controllers at the control tower received messages from pilots through loudspeakers. Hearing mixed voices through a single loudspeaker made the task very difficult. In Cherry's experiment, mimicking the problem faced by air traffic controllers, participants had to listen to two messages played simultaneously from one loudspeaker and repeat what they heard. This was later termed the dichotic listening task. Though introduced by Colin Cherry, Donald Broadbent is often regarded as the first to systematically apply dichotic listening tests in his research. Broadbent used the method of dichotic listening to test how participants selectively attend to stimuli when overloaded with auditory stimuli; Broadbent used his findings to develop the filter model of attention in 1958. Broadbent theorized that the human information processing system has a "bottleneck" due to limited capacity and that the brain performs an "early selection" before processing auditory information. Broadbent proposed that auditory information enters an unlimited sensory buffer and that one stream of information is filtered out and passes through the bottleneck to be cohesive, while all others that are not selected quickly decay in salience and are not processed. Broadbent's model contradicts with the cocktail party phenomenon because Broadbent's model predicts that people would never respond to their names from unattended sources since unattended information is discarded before being processed. Deutsch and Deutsch's late selection model, proposed in 1963, is a competing model to Broadbent's early selection model. Deutsch and Deutsch's model theorizes that all information and sensory input are attended to and processed for meaning. Later in the processing routine, just before information enters the short-term memory, a filter analyzes the semantic characteristics of the information and lets stimuli containing relevant information pass through to short-term memory and removes irrelevant information. Deutsch and Deutsch's model for selective auditory attention suggests that weak response to unattended stimuli comes from an internal decision on informational relevance, where more important stimuli are prioritized to enter the working memory first. In 1964, Anne Treisman, a graduate student of Broadbent, improved Broadent's theory and proposed her own attenuation model. In Treisman's model, unattended information is attenuated, tuned down compared to attended information, but still processed. For example, in a situation where a person is exposed to three extraneous sources of sound in a coffee shop while ordering a drink (chatter, coffee brewer, music), Treisman's model indicates that they would still pick up on the latter three sounds while attending to the cashier. These extraneous sources of noise, however, would be muffled as if their "volumes" were turned down. Treisman also suggests that a threshold mechanism exists in selective auditory attention in which words from the unattended stream of information can grab one's attention. Words of low threshold, higher level of meaning and importance, such as one's name and "watch out", redirects one's attention to where it is urgently required.
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