Cognitive Interactions within Sensory Information in Perception

The dynamics present during early information processing at the sensory level of the auditory system have long been studied, and there are two broad views of this processing. The purely bottom-up view is that sensory information is passed up to higher-level cognitive systems in an automatic process of successive recoding. By contrast, the top-down view is that cognitive processing can interact with sensory processes to modify representations even at the earliest levels of sensation. One way of understanding these interactions is to examine individual differences that are not simply reflective of lower-level sensory systems, especially those under cognitive control such as attention. While findings exist that document a relationship between individual differences in auditory attention and visual working memory (WM; Giuliano et al., 2014), few studies have investigated the relationship between individual differences in auditory attention/WM and early speech processing. The current study was designed to assess the relationship between individual differences in attention/WM and signal detection of speech sounds In addition, the higher-level cognitive attribute of "dissociation"--a feeling of disconnection from the immediate situation--was also measured to approach higher-level differences in attention. We examined how differences in dissociative states relate to attention and signal detection. Participants were presented with a task that served as a measure of auditory working memory (WM) and selective attention, a two-step N-Back (2-Back) task, and a task that served as a measure of participants' ability to detect speech signals embedded in noise. Survey measures for cognitive dissociation were also collected for each participant. Signal detection and WM task performance were correlated with dissociation survey scores. Additionally, WM and selective attention are correlated with speech signal detection, although primarily in terms of false alarm errors.