Back

Reverberation exacerbates effects of interruption on auditory spatial selective attention

Figarola, V.; Liang, W.; Luthra, S.; Brown, C.; Shinn-Cunningham, B. G.

2025-12-17 neuroscience
10.64898/2025.12.15.694434 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Everyday listening requires focusing on one talker while ignoring competing sounds, a process challenged by reverberation and unexpected distractions. Here, we asked whether reverberation decreases effects of distractions by reducing the salience of new onsets, or compounds disruption by increasing task difficulty. Across five online experiments, participants recalled spatialized syllable streams presented with or without interrupters under pseudo-anechoic and reverberant conditions. Interrupters consistently impaired recall, especially the syllables following the interrupter. For the syllable immediately after the interruption, this effect was larger in reverberation than in anechoic conditions. These results demonstrate that distractions are especially disruptive in reverberant settings.

Published in JASA Express Letters · not in our set (fewer than 10 published preprints to learn from) · training set

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.