Attending to the Auditory Scene Improves Situational Awareness

Early studies suggested that auditory stimuli are only (cognitively) processed if they are relevant for the task. However, studies that are more recent show that this is not necessarily true. Rather, it depends on the nature of the auditory stimuli. Environmental sounds are processed even when they are irrelevant for the task and even when participants are engaged in demanding visual tasks. These latter results can be interpreted within the framework of situational awareness. To maintain situational awareness, it is essential to continuously scan the environment for unexpected sounds that might not be of immediate task relevance but could inform us about important changes in the environment. In the current study, we investigate whether and how the scanning for, and processing of, environmental sounds—in other words, situational awareness of the auditory scene—is influenced by auditory attention manipulations. Here, auditory attention was manipulated by requiring participants to perform an auditory oddball-detection task or not, while task-irrelevant environmental sounds were occasionally presented in the background. The current study answers the following questions: (1) Is the processing of environmental sounds influenced by manipulations of auditory attention or is it an automatic process? (2) Is the processing of irrelevant environmental sounds attenuated or enhanced by auditory attention? On the one hand, the processing of the irrelevant environmental sounds could be attenuated, because the additional task increases the demand for auditory attentional resources. On the other hand, the processing of the environmental sounds could be enhanced because more attention is directed toward the auditory channel to optimize performance in the auditory oddball-detection task