The time course and consequences of switching attention between auditory objects

 Our everyday environments are filled with sounds from multiple sources—the voice of a friend, a passing car, music on a radio. Each of these sounds is a separate auditory object, just as visual images of the friend, the car, and the radio are separate visual objects. Limits in selective attention prevent us from attending to more than one object at a time. Therefore, it is assumed that when multiple auditory objects are present, we must switch our attention between them. We have developed a rapid behavioral test that reliably yields misperceptions that are consistent with this assumption. Crucially, these misperceptions also suggest that we ‘blackout’ during the period when we are switching attention, and then ‘glue together’ the events that occurred immediately before and immediately after the blackout, leading to erroneous perception of the relative timing of events. Thus, it appears that our perception of the ongoing auditory world may be based on attention-driven samples of auditory information that are separated by attention switches during which we unwittingly lose the auditory information that occurred during the switch, as well as our perception of the passing of time. If so, switching attention would be particularly troublesome for children, older adults, and certain clinical populations, in whom the attention-switch time is particularly long.

Beverly A. Wright is a professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. From April to September 2026, she will be at ARI as a Berta Karlik Fellow.

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