The multisensory cocktail party problem in adults: Perceptual segregation of talking faces on the basis of audiovisual temporal synchrony

Cognition ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 214 ◽  
pp. 104743
Author(s):  
David J. Lewkowicz ◽  
Mark Schmuckler ◽  
Vishakha Agrawal
Author(s):  
Alistair J. Harvey ◽  
C. Philip Beaman

Abstract Rationale To test the notion that alcohol impairs auditory attentional control by reducing the listener’s cognitive capacity. Objectives We examined the effect of alcohol consumption and working memory span on dichotic speech shadowing and the cocktail party effect—the ability to focus on one of many simultaneous speakers yet still detect mention of one’s name amidst the background speech. Alcohol was expected either to increase name detection, by weakening the inhibition of irrelevant speech, or reduce name detection, by restricting auditory attention on to the primary input channel. Low-span participants were expected to show larger drug impairments than high-span counterparts. Methods On completion of the working memory span task, participants (n = 81) were randomly assigned to an alcohol or placebo beverage treatment. After alcohol absorption, they shadowed speech presented to one ear while ignoring the synchronised speech of a different speaker presented to the other. Each participant’s first name was covertly embedded in to-be-ignored speech. Results The “cocktail party effect” was not affected by alcohol or working memory span, though low-span participants made more shadowing errors and recalled fewer words from the primary channel than high-span counterparts. Bayes factors support a null effect of alcohol on the cocktail party phenomenon, on shadowing errors and on memory for either shadowed or ignored speech. Conclusion Findings suggest that an alcoholic beverage producing a moderate level of intoxication (M BAC ≈ 0.08%) neither enhances nor impairs the cocktail party effect.


2010 ◽  
pp. 61-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tariqullah Jan ◽  
Wenwu Wang

Cocktail party problem is a classical scientific problem that has been studied for decades. Humans have remarkable skills in segregating target speech from a complex auditory mixture obtained in a cocktail party environment. Computational modeling for such a mechanism is however extremely challenging. This chapter presents an overview of several recent techniques for the source separation issues associated with this problem, including independent component analysis/blind source separation, computational auditory scene analysis, model-based approaches, non-negative matrix factorization and sparse coding. As an example, a multistage approach for source separation is included. The application areas of cocktail party processing are explored. Potential future research directions are also discussed.


2009 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 2489-2489
Author(s):  
Micheal L. Dent ◽  
Barbara G. Shinn‐Cunningham ◽  
Kamal Sen

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayaganesh Swaminathan ◽  
Christine R. Mason ◽  
Timothy M. Streeter ◽  
Virginia Best ◽  
Gerald Kidd, Jr ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 582-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan-min Qian ◽  
Chao Weng ◽  
Xuan-kai Chang ◽  
Shuai Wang ◽  
Dong Yu

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. 1875-1902 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Haykin ◽  
Zhe Chen

This review presents an overview of a challenging problem in auditory perception, the cocktail party phenomenon, the delineation of which goes back to a classic paper by Cherry in 1953. In this review, we address the following issues: (1) human auditory scene analysis, which is a general process carried out by the auditory system of a human listener; (2) insight into auditory perception, which is derived from Marr's vision theory; (3) computational auditory scene analysis, which focuses on specific approaches aimed at solving the machine cocktail party problem; (4) active audition, the proposal for which is motivated by analogy with active vision, and (5) discussion of brain theory and independent component analysis, on the one hand, and correlative neural firing, on the other.


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