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We studied negative priming (NP) in auditory attention switching. In a cued variant of dichotic listening, two spoken number words were presented, one to each ear, one spoken by a female, and one spoken by a male voice. A visual cue indicated whether the male or female voice was the target. A numerical magnitude judgement of the target number was required. The selection criterion could either switch or repeat across trials, so there were attention switch and repetition trials. Two experiments examined NP (distractor becomes target) and also included a "competitor priming" (CP) condition (target becomes distractor), relative to a "no priming" condition (target and distractor not related to previous trial). In Experiment 1, we investigated the basic priming effects. In Experiment 2, we additionally varied the response-cue interval (RCI; 100 ms vs. 1,900 ms) to examine time-related changes in priming. We found longer response times (RT) for switch trials compared with repetition trials (attention switch costs)-that is, when the internal processing context changed. In addition, we found longer RT for NP trials as well as reduced switch costs in long RCI, suggesting that previously relevant attentional settings dissipate over longer time. However, NP was not influenced by attention switches, and it was also not affected by RCI. Hence, NP in auditory attention switching does not seem strongly context or time sensitive.

The goal of the present study was to investigate preparatory mechanisms of auditory selective attention. In two experiments, participants performed a classification task on one of two dichotically presented spoken number words, one spoken by a female, one spoken by a male. A cue indicated which gender participants had to attend to in the upcoming trial, so that attention switches and repetitions occurred randomly. The cue-target interval (CTI) was either 400 ms or 1,200 ms. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between target and distractor word varied; hence, the distractor could be presented before or after the target. In two experiments, we found robust performance costs of attention switches. Like in previous studies using versions of this paradigm, these switch costs were not significantly reduced by prolonged CTI, even though we found substantial general cue-based preparation effects. The most important finding refers to the influence of SOA, showing that the general preparation effect was greater in the condition with the distractor presented first than in the condition with the target presented first. Thus, increased time to prepare for the attention focus of the upcoming trials seems to benefit distractor suppression more than target enhancement. This occurred in switch trials and repetition trials alike, suggesting that it is a general feature of auditory attention.

An auditory attention-switching paradigm was combined with a judgment-switching paradigm to examine the interaction of a varying auditory attention component and a varying judgment component. Participants heard two dichotically presented stimuli-one spoken by a female speaker and one spoken by a male speaker. In each trial, the stimuli were a spoken letter and a spoken number. A visual explicit cue at the beginning of each trial indicated the auditory attention criterion (speaker sex/ear) to identify the target stimulus (Experiment 1) or the judgment that had to be executed (Experiment 2). Hence, the attentional selection criterion switched independently between speaker sexes (or between ears), while the judgment alternated between letter categorization and number categorization. The data indicate that auditory attention criterion and judgment were not processed independently, regardless of whether the attention criterion or the judgment was cued. The partial repetition benefits of the explicitly cued component suggested a hierarchical organization of the auditory attention component and the judgment component within the task set. We suggest that the hierarchy arises due to the explicit cuing of one component rather than due to a "natural" hierarchy of auditory attention component and judgment component.