Selective deafness

Selective auditory attention or selective hearing is a type of selective attention and involves the auditory system of the nervous system. Selective hearing is characterized as the action in which people focus their attention on a specific source of a sound or spoken words. The sounds and noise in the surrounding environment is heard by the auditory system but only certain parts of the auditory information are processed in the brain. Most often, auditory attention is directed at things people are most interested in hearing. In an article by Krans, Isbell, Giuliano, and Neville (2013), selective auditory attention is defined as the ability to acknowledge some stimuli while ignoring other stimuli that is occurring at the same time. An example of this is a student focusing on a teacher giving a lesson and ignoring the sounds of classmates in a rowdy classroom (p. 53). This is an example of bottlenecking which means that information cannot be processed simultaneously so only some sensory information gets through the "bottleneck" and is processed. A brain simply cannot process all sensory information that is occurring in an environment so only that which is most important is thoroughly processed. Selective hearing is not a physiological disorder but rather it is the capability of humans to block out sounds and noise. It is the notion of ignoring certain things in the surrounding environment. Over the years, there has been increased research in the selectivity of auditory attention, namely selective hearing.

The cocktail party problem was first brought up in 1953 by Colin Cherry. This common problem is how our minds solves the issue of knowing what in the auditory scene is important and combining those in a coherent whole, such as the problem of how we can perceive our friend talking in the midst of a crowded cocktail party. He suggested that the auditory system can filter sounds being heard. Physical characteristics of the auditory information such as speaker's voice or location can improve a person's ability to focus on certain stimuli even if there is other auditory stimuli present. Cherry also did work with shadowing which involves different information being played into both ears and only one ear's information can be processed and remembered (Eysneck, 2012, p. 84). Another psychologist, Albert Bregman, came up with the auditory scene analysis model. The model has three main characteristics: segmentation, integration, and segregation. Segmentation involves the division of auditory messages into segments of importance. The process of combining parts of an auditory message to form a whole is associated with integration. Segregation is the separation of important auditory messages and the unwanted information in the brain. It is important to note that Bregman also makes a link back to the idea of perception. He states that it is essential for one to make a useful representation of the world from sensory inputs around us. Without perception, an individual will not recognize or have the knowledge of what is going on around them. While Begman's seminal work is critical to understanding selective auditory attention, his studies did not focus on the way in which an auditory message is selected, if and when it was correctly segregated from other sounds in a mixture, which is a critical stage of selective auditory attention. Inspired in part by Bregman's work, a number of researchers then set out to link directly work on auditory scene analysis to the processes governing attention, including Maria Chait, Mounya Elhilali, Shihab Shamma, and Barbara Shinn-Cunningham.

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