Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London
This is a slightly edited version of the experiment we ran for our forthcoming article (Dalton & Fraenkel, 2012). In the last few days it’s been reported on by various media outlets, including the BBC, the Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Please put on some headphones and try it for yourself.
As always, we’d love to hear your comments!
Sandra is currently planning our lab’s first ever EEG study of auditory attention. If you have any tips or advice, we would love to hear from you.
We have two exciting new research projects starting up at the moment. Cassandra, Sharayne, Holly and Kate will be looking at the effects of task choice on attention performance. And Catriona, Jenny, Camilla and Nicola will be looking at the links between auditory attention and awareness. The projects are currently undergoing scrutiny by the ethics committee, so we should be ready to start testing in a couple of weeks. Good luck everyone!
We’re currently running a new experiment in the lab which involves listening to immersive, realistic 3D sound recordings (again, recorded using a special dummy head), and are looking for more people to take part. It takes about 10 minutes, and we’ve been getting really good feedback from the people who’ve taken part so far: most people seem to have found it genuinely fun and interesting!
If you’re interested, please do get in touch for more information or to arrange a time to come and take part.
We’re currently looking for people to take part in a short experiment on auditory attention which involves sitting at a computer for about 10 mins and responding to sounds played over headphones. We can pay participants £2 for taking part.
If you’re interested in taking part, or would like to know more, please get in touch.
This week we’ve been recording a lot of sounds using a recording technique known as “binaural recording” or, more specifically, “dummy head recording”. This involves using an acoustically realistic dummy head with microphones in its ears to produce recordings which, when listened to on headphones, convey an extremely realistic sense of space – often creating the illusion that the sound is actually in the room around the listener. This is because the acoustics of the head and especially the ears play very important roles in allowing us to derive spatial information from the sound that we hear – information which is lost with most ordinary recording techniques.
To hear an example of what these recordings sound like, try listening to this with headphones:
[audio:https://attentionlab.psychologyresearch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/binaural-demo-1.mp3|titles=Binaural Demo 1]
(Sounds in this example: jangling keys, rustling bags, fake motorbike engine)
The primary purpose of the recordings that we’re making is for an experiment / activity that we’re planning to run at the Science Open Day here at Royal Holloway on the 27th February, but if that goes well we’re hoping to use them subsequently in a range of auditory attention-related experiments.
We’re currently looking for people who have some experience of using an in-car satnav system to take part in two short studies, taking about 30 mins in total. One is a questionnaire about satnav usage. The other is a short experiment on auditory attention and involves sitting at a computer for about 10 mins and responding to sounds played over headphones. We can pay participants £5 for taking part.
If you’re interested in taking part, or would like to know more, please get in touch.
Two undergraduate projects are currently running in the lab:
Please contact us if you’re interested in taking part in either experiment.