Influence of source location and temporal structure on spatial auditory saliency

Hitherto, not many studies have dealt with spatial auditory saliency. Auditory attention studies concerned with spatial aspects generally concentrate on top-down selective or divided attention, e.g., where subjects are asked to attend to one source at a specific location whilst being distracted with sources from different directions. The work presented here reports on experiments in which bottom-up spatial auditory attention, or saliency, has been tested. The tests were run using a fully immersive 3D audio-visual reproduction system, where interactions between auditory and visual modalities have been included. We tested how temporal structure and absolute location of sound sources around the listener influence saliency and attention.