Development of Auditory Selective Attention: Why Children Struggle to Hear in Noisy Environments

Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Developmental psychology 2015-03, Vol.51 (3), p.353-369
Main Authors: Jones, Pete R, Moore, David R, Amitay, Sygal
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Acoustics
Adult
Adults
Age Differences
Attention
Auditory Masking
Auditory Perception
Auditory Perception - physiology
Auditory Stimuli
Child
Child Development
Child Development - physiology
Children
Children & youth
Cognitive Development
Deafness
Developmental psychology
Ears & hearing
England (Nottingham)
Female
Foreign Countries
Hearing (Physiology)
Human
Humans
Male
Noise
Noise - adverse effects
Noise Effects
Perceptual Masking - physiology
Psychoacoustics
Psychometrics
Quantitative psychology
Selective Attention
Sound Spectrography
Stimuli
Young Adult
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Summary:Children's hearing deteriorates markedly in the presence of unpredictable noise. To explore why, 187 school-age children (4-11 years) and 15 adults performed a tone-in-noise detection task, in which the masking noise varied randomly between every presentation. Selective attention was evaluated by measuring the degree to which listeners were influenced by (i.e., gave weight to) each spectral region of the stimulus. Psychometric fits were also used to estimate levels of internal noise and bias. Levels of masking were found to decrease with age, becoming adult-like by 9-11 years. This change was explained by improvements in selective attention alone, with older listeners better able to ignore noise similar in frequency to the target. Consistent with this, age-related differences in masking were abolished when the noise was made more distant in frequency to the target. This work offers novel evidence that improvements in selective attention are critical for the normal development of auditory judgments.
ISSN:0012-1649
1939-0599
DOI:10.1037/a0038570