Freesound Forums

Hi All,

I just found this site! I am trying to conduct an experiment to finish my dissertation ...I am attempting to study the effects of ignoring irrelevant stimuli when participants are asked to fixate on a background sound...sort of like the post someone had on the cocktail party effect.

Is anyone else out there interested in this? If so maybe you can steer me in the right direction. Right now I am actually getting the opposite of what I expected - people are getting used to the background noise and are being alerted by the irrelevant information.

Any help or suggestions would be apprecitated!

Have a look at "dare4" and the autism thread http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5706#5706

Maybe some of the contibutions to that project could help you.
e.g. http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=23238

Mike

Hi Mike,

Thanks so much! The links and wave files were very interesting! I wish I could use these in my experiment but my dissertation committee is not so open to real world sounds (which is what I wanted to do). I am presently using white noise (high frequency only so I don't get a masking effect)...my irrelevant stimuli are pure 1000 ht tones - some are constant, some are modulated and some a sham stimuli (fade out quicker than the other type to represent a catch trial in which all participants will be able to filter out quickly).

I am having some interesting problems that I can't figure out - they are reporting fading quicker to the constant sound and modulated sounds than the sham trials - somehow the sound fading out seems to confuse them - they wait and wait for it to "reappear".

I am going a bit crazy...any suggestions would be most appreciated!

Thanks,

Jackie