Auditory inattentional deafness investigated with eye tracking

This thesis will examine auditory selective attention and inattentional deafness with an eyetracking approach. Some studies show that if a change happens between two modalities, like a visual task with an audio change or an audio task with a visual change, the inattentional blindness and inattentional deafness could be decreased with the help of the changes in multimodal conditions. The current experiment aims to take the first step and expand the understanding of the effects of multimodal changes on inattentional deafness. The main aim of this thesis is whether the type of environmental sounds affects the recognition of hidden sounds and whether the participants counting the lightning strike (thunder) and the sound of the wave hitting the shore will have an impact on the inattentional deafness or not. Our research questions are; (1) the participants who hear the negative environmental sound (Thunder) and the positive environmental sound (Wave) will be less likely to detect the hidden sound than the participants who hear the hidden sounds in silent conditions, but also we hypothesis that the environmental negative sound will decrease the awareness of the hidden sounds depending on its effects on participants internal mood, (2) participants pupil size will show the difference when hidden sounds are given in the experiment. Results of the experiment showed that the sound type had an impact on participants awareness of the hidden sounds. Our results indicated that the hidden sound awareness affect the pupil size of the participants in general and type of environmental sound had an impact on hidden sound awareness.