16:30 - 18:00
Wed—HZ_9—Talks9—96
Wed-Talks9
Room:
Room: HZ_9
Chair/s:
Artyom Zinchenko
Contextual cueing in the auditory modality
Wed—HZ_9—Talks9—9603
Presented by: Ananya Mandal
Ananya Mandal 1*Heinrich Liesefeld 2Thomas Geyer 1Artyom Zinchenko 1
1 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 2 Universität Bremen
Although contextual cueing (CC) has been extensively studied in visual tasks, it remains unexplored in the auditory modality. To address this, we developed a novel paradigm, which for the first time convincingly demonstrates the CC effect in the auditory modality. Here, each trial consisted of a sequence of spatially presented auditory stimuli and participants responded to a target (number 4 or 5) presented amongst distractor stimuli (letters from the English alphabet). The trials in a block were either repeated (invariant distractors) or non-repeated (random distractors), with faster reaction times to repeated trials representing a CC effect. Across a series of experiments that systematically manipulated various aspects of the distractors (locations, order, or identities), we demonstrate a robust auditory CC effect that can be effectively distinguished from sequence learning. Along with extending CC to the auditory modality, this paradigm also opens up new possibilities of research on statistical learning in multisensory environments.

Keywords: auditory contextual cueing, statistical learning, auditory attention