A Listening Experiment to Study Intentional Switching of Auditory Selective Attention in Preschool Children

Abstract

In their everyday lives, children are confronted with the challenge of orienting themselves in complex acoustic situations. Therefore, they need the ability to focus on a relevant target source while ignoring simultaneous distracting sounds in a multi-layered acoustic environment, known as auditory selective attention. Children are often required to intentionally shift their attention from one target source to another, e.g., when they are called by an educator while talking to each other. A paradigm to study the intentional switching of auditory selective attention was extended for schoolchildren at the Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics (IHTA) at RWTH Aachen University. It considers close-to-real-life aspects like spatial reproduction and background noise in a virtual acoustic environment. To investigate the intentional switching of auditory selective attention in preschool children aged three to six, the present study refined that paradigm. 91 children (3-6 years, 47.25% female) from several daycare centers in Aachen participated in a listening experiment. Results revealed a performance decrease for the presence of distracting speech and findings of age-related developments in cognitive processing that can be interpreted as developmental increases in cognitive speed.