EEG-Based and Self-Perceived Assessment of Auditory Discrimination and Attentional Responses to Intensity, Pitch and Localization Changes
Academic Article in Scopus
Auditory displays use sounds to communicate or monitor states and processes without the need for visual indicators. These auditory cues need people's attentional shift towards them. Auditory attentional processes can be measured through perceptual tests, and electrophysiological tests, such as auditory evoked potentials, that function as an indicator when different stimuli are presented. Assessment through auditory evoked potentials often use the oddball paradigm composed by frequent and deviant stimuli, where deviant stimuli can vary different auditory features (pitch, intensity, time, localization, speech). This study tests the attentional acoustic feature differences perceived through auditory evoked potentials. The discrimination paradigm was applied to 12 normal hearing students 18 - 25 years old, to measure their electrophysiological response changes using electroencephalogram readings in pitch, intensity, and localization of deviant sounds. Participants were also asked to fill in a questionnaire about their perception of attention during the test and the ease of discrimination. N2-P3a complex analysis indicated better attentional discrimination for pitch changes, followed by intensity and localization, supported by participant's questionnaire answers and number of deviants count-ed. These findings suggest that from these features, pitch changes can be widely considered when designing auditory displays that aim to easily shift people's attention towards the sound.
