Constraints on the selection of auditory information

Four experiments were conducted to determine whether or not (a) selection of auditory information may be guided separately by location and frequency channels and (b) auditory attention is allocated to spatial locations and frequency regions or to auditory objects (i.e., streams). In Experiment 1, listeners were to categorize tones by location or frequency. In Experiments 2A and 2B, target identification was examined as a function of its similarity to a precue. In Experiment 3, the rime required to detect a target embedded within a sequence of distractor tones was examined. In all experiments, performance depended on both location and frequency information even if I of these features was completely irrelevant with respect to the task. Results indicate that selection of auditory information is accomplished by an attentional template normally defined by both location and frequency parameters.