Forming clusters of multiple sounds improves talker identification in an auditory scene

In several recent papers we have shown that listeners perceive differences in the size of a small auditory scene (< 4 sources) for short-duration sounds (e.g., consonant-vowel, CV, pairs) presented at about the same time, but such differences are not perceived for larger scenes. Spatial separation of a small number of sound sources affects performance much more than spatially separating a larger number of sound sources. In this presentation, the number of sound sources is small, but not the number of sounds (CVs). For example, listeners are poor at determining if a target talker is the same as a cue talker, when the target is presented at one sound-source location and several distractor talkers are presented each at different sound-source locations. If all distractor talkers are “clustered (mixed)” at a single source spatially separated from the target sound source, then listeners are better at determining if the target talker was the same as the cue. Several additional scenarios were tested, all indicating that “clustering” sounds into a small number of sound sources improves target-talker identification compared to when sounds are presented from a larger number of sources.